The Oxford Labour Party and the Working Class

2018 ◽  
pp. 211-214
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Party

Labour Woman and the Housewife

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Food Prices ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Way

The chapter discusses how Labour Party women engaged with the newly-enfranchised housewife between the wars. It focuses on how Labour Woman represented the working-class housewife and the degree to which it enabled her to speak for herself. It chose everyday domestic life, traditionally assumed to be beyond politics, as the way to connect with unorganised women in their homes. In its Housewife Column the relevance of politics to women’s daily lives was explored through domestic topics such food prices, housework, washing and making clothes. Even with the increasing dominance of recipes and dress patterns in the 1930s, the journal continued to see the housewife as having agency and a distinct experience shaped by class. For Labour Woman interwar domesticity was neither cosy nor rationalised and modern, it was a space which provided the means to engage with the everyday lives of ordinary women.

Concluding remarks

2018 ◽  
pp. 271-279
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Common Concern ◽  
The Future ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Different Levels

The conclusion begins with an overview of the way the chapters in the volume have offered an exploration of three different levels of conflict – intra-organisational tensions, tensions which exist between different types of organisations, and tensions between labour organisations and spontaneous working-class protests – to collectively provide explanations to the paradoxes affecting the Labour movement. It then stresses the benefits of the volume’s integrated and multidisciplinary approach of the labour movement, underlining the fact that the contributors share a common concern for the future of the British labour movement. In the following section the conclusion ponders the future prospects for the labour movement and the Labour Party, sketching a number of possible scenarios. It stresses the fact that visions of the future differ according to political positioning. It then highlights the shared conviction of the contributors that class remains relevant as an analytical tool.

Childhood

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-75
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Home Life ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter argues that it is impossible to understand the Kenneys’ politics without understanding their home life. It suggests that we need to see the Kenneys as a product of two related cultures: the tradition of autodidactism and the ‘religion of socialism’. Reading, Christianity, and socialism underpinned these cultures and help explain the sisters’ political trajectory. Though many women were drawn to feminist activism from particular strands of the labour movement, particularly the Independent Labour Party and the trade unions, these were not the only currents of thought which influenced women’s politics. The Kenneys’ childhoods not only give us access to working-class women’s political development outside the workplace but also begin to connect feminist militancy with a different political tradition.

THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE CAPITALIST FIRM, c. 1950–1970

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM TOMLINSON
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Issue Framing ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist Firm ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour's ideological and policy debate. The centrality of this issue reflected the fact that understanding the firm was inextricably linked to a raft of broader arguments within the Left about the nature of modern capitalism. The benign view of the corporation that flowed from the revisionist wing of the party was challenged by the ‘declinist’ politics of the 1960s, and in office after 1964 Labour pursued a modernizing agenda which centrally involved seeking to shape the behaviour of the private sector in order to deliver the higher economic growth that Labour so much desired. The failure of this growth to materialize led to great disillusion across the party about the policies pursued by the Wilson government, and this in turn led to a fundamental rethink of policy that was to underpin the radical agenda of the party in the 1970s.

scholarly journals Social Mobility and Class Formation: The Worklife Social Mobility of Men in a New Zealand Suburb, 1902–1928

1999 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Olssen ◽  
Hamish James
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Political History ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Behaviour ◽  
The Relationship

This paper explores the relationship between social mobility and class formation in a working-class industrial suburb. By establishing the degree of class closure in three periods we can identify the relationship between the country's political history, dominated by the rise of a left-wing Labour Party, and the changing levels of closure. Labour established itself during a period of low mobility then stalled when mobility increased sharply in the 1920s. Comparison with the mobility rates for cities in other countries allows further analysis of the relationship between social structure and political behaviour. Our evidence indicates that voters were not unconscious of the shifting patterns of class rigidity.

scholarly journals The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Reynolds ◽  
K. Lay Bourn
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Union Support ◽  
Domesday Book ◽  
History Of

Opening the 21st anniversary of the ILP in Bradford in April 1914, J. H. Palin, one of Bradford's most prominent trade unionists, remarked: “Of ordinary historical association, Bradford has none. In Domesday Book, it is described as a waste, and the subsequent periods of capitalist exploitation have done little to improve it. […] The History of Bradford will be very largely the history of the ILP.”1 Palin's remark – unjust as it is, perhaps, to a distinguished list of Victorian philanthropists – stands as testimony to the authority and influence which the labour movement in Bradford had acquired by that date. It also provides a clue to the origins of that authority and influence, for it demonstrates the importance which he and other Bradford trade unionists attached to their association with the independent labour movement. Whatever the reactions of trade unionists in the rest of the country, in Bradford, trade unionists were vital to its success. Indeed, strong trade-union support proved to be an essential corollary of effective independent working-class political action.

The British Labour Party and the Working Class

1978 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 734
Author(s):  
Stanley Pierson ◽  
Tom Forester
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
British Labour

Labour Party Politics and the Working Class: Problems of Validity

1977 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-128
Author(s):  
Anthony Mughan
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Discriminatory Power ◽  
Face Validity ◽  
Measuring Instruments ◽  
Party Activists

Steven Beackon's ‘Labour Party Politics and the Working Class’ (this Journal, VI (1976), 231–8) highlights a common problem in political science research, an inadequate concern for the validity of measuring instruments.On the basis of six statements, the first three of which are claimed to be of an explicitly class character whilst the other three are not, Beackon classifies Labour party activists into those who perceived the party as a class party and those who did not. The weak discriminatory power of these statements is evidenced by their failure to assign fully 39 per cent of the respondents to either category. This third group of activists was labelled ‘Ambivalents’. An assessment of the measuring instrument's face validity, however, suggests that this ambivalence is due not so much to these activists' ambiguous perceptions of the party as to the shortcomings of the instrument itself.

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