Suchergebnisse

A comprehensive history of the Labour party from one of the brightest young historians of 20th century Britain.2024 marks the centenary of the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. What legacy of the past have they left behind? How far has each Labour administration influenced succeeding administrations? Above all, was the Attlee government of 1945 really the golden period of Labour power?Professor Richard Toye explores Labour s exercise of power as a continuum, setting Attlee s administration in long-term historical context between the first Labour Government of 1924 and the current party under Keir Starmer. Within this context he shows why the Attlee administration matters so much and how successive Labour governments have fashioned it in their own image.Into this story are woven the foundation of the Labour Party in 1900, the First World War, the General Strike of 1926, the Spanish Civil War and the coalition war-time government under Churchill. Also discussed are the great names of Labour history: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee himself, Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson and Ellen Wilkinson.Covering Labour's history all the way up to the present - including Wilson and Blair's attempts to wrap themselves in Attlee s mantle and Corbyn s version of Attlee focussed on the NHS and the welfare state - Age of Hope is an incisive, informative look at a political party that has been fundamental in shaping modern Britain and will be equally instrumental in its future

In the general election of 1931, the Labour Party campaigned on the slogan `Plan or Perish'. The party's pledge to create a planned socialist economy was a novelty, and marked the rejection of the gradualist, evolutionary socialism to which Labour had adhered under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald. Although heavily defeated in that election, Labour stuck to its commitment. The Attlee government came to power in 1945 determined to plan comprehensively. Yet, the aspiration to create a fully planned economy was not met. This book explores the origins and evolution of the promise, in order to explain why it was not fulfilled. RICHARD TOYE lectures in history at Homerton College, Cambridge

Abstract
This article explores three case-studies—the Munich crisis of 1938, the Suez crisis and war of 1956 and the Iraq war of 2003—as examples of 'how not to run international affairs'. On the face of it, all three episodes were disasters. Irrespective of whether Munich was strategically correct, Neville Chamberlain's public presentation of the agreement was a clear miscalculation. Anthony Eden created an elaborate pretext for invading Egypt, which was nevertheless so see-through that it destroyed British credibility. Tony Blair appears to have persuaded himself into believing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and basing his case for war upon this idea left him exposed when the weapons were shown not to exist. Whereas it is easy to say that these mistakes should not have been made, it is harder to suggest mechanisms that would prevent leaders falling prey to such delusions, when their immediate political interests appear to depend on them. The article concludes that in these three cases failure was over-determined; on the other hand, there are many everyday crises that foreign policy actors, who understand 'how not to run international affairs', succeed in preventing from turning into disasters.

© 2014 The Author. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; The article analyses the rhetorical culture of the House of Commons in the era following the extension of the franchise in 1918, a period in which parliament saw a major influx of new Labour MPs, and also the entry for the first time of small number of women. The article discusses not only the norms and expectations surrounding parliamentary speech but also the ways in which some speaking styles and techniques became controversial. In particular, the Labour Party was accused by its opponents of practising 'rowdyism'. This allegation was part of a wider effort to undermine the party's constitutional credentials and to present it as unfit to govern. Thus, arguments about styles of arguing went the heart of broader debates over political legitimacy. To a considerable degree, Labour MPs were co-opted over time into existing codes of behaviour. But although Conservative efforts to associate their own oratorical style with political virtue did have some success, partisan factors alone are not sufficient to explain the shifts in rhetorical culture, which changed, in part, for reasons external to the institution itself. As power moved from the legislature to the executive, and as politics became increasingly professionalized, the speaking culture of the House of Commons was affected by a longstanding evolution from a discursive to a programmatic view of statecraft. Styles and techniques of parliamentary argument were thus influenced both by the changing nature of the state and by the shifting bargain between voters and the political classes in the era of universal suffrage.