Stephen Brooke

England Arise!: The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain.

Labour and society before 1939 wartime radicalism and Labours response hopes and fears - the 1945 General Election building socialism popular culture and reconstruction into affluence Labour after 1951.

Labour's war : the Labour Party during the Second World War

Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Road from 1931 2. Forward to War 1939-1940 3. Coalition and its Discontents 4. Policy-Making 1941-1943 5. Labour in the Coalition 6. Labour and Economic Policy during the Second World War 7. Socialism and the War: Old Problems and New Country 8. Forward to Peace 1944-1945 Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Problems of ‘Socialist Planning’: Evan Durbin and the Labour Government of 1945

‘Socialist planning’ was a notable, if unlikely casualty of Labour government after the Second World War. Between 1931 and the election victory of 1945, central economic planning was, in the words of G.D.H. Cole, the ‘professed creed of the Labour Party’. Depression and war demonstrated that the anarchy of free-market capitalism had to ‘give way to ordered planning under national control’. Labour won the election of 1945 with a commitment to ‘plan from the ground up’ through the socialization of industry, the establishment of a national investment board and the use of wide-ranging economic controls. Planning was the defining characteristic of Labours socialism in this period and it could indeed be argued that the party did not find so effective a political rhetoric until ‘Labour and the scientific revolution’ in 1963.

The Labour Party, Women, and the Problem of Gender, 1951–1966

Following the 1966 General Election, the Labour Partys Home Policy Committee observed that the party had, “for the first time, obtained a majority of the female vote” and remarked, “it would be very satisfactory if we could retain it.” Two years later, the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Party Organisation emphasized the “imperative that the Party concerns itself with how to win much more support among women.” These comments not only betrayed a serious weakness in Labours electoral support between 1951 and 1966 but also acknowledged an important lacuna in its broader political outlook. Given the partys electoral difficulties in the period after 1951, the first concern was particularly apposite. Beatrix Campbell, Nicky Hart, and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska have underlined the importance of this gender gap favoring the Conservatives after 1950 (see fig. 1). In the elections of 1951 and 1955, for example, Labours vote among women lagged twelve and thirteen percentage points behind that of the Conservatives. Only in two elections between 1945 and 1970 did Labour enjoy leads among female voters, and these were much less substantial than those held by the Conservatives in 1951, 1955, 1959, and 1964. In rough numerical terms, this difference was potentially very significant. In 1951, for instance, women made up approximately 51.9 percent of the population of England, Scotland, and Wales and roughly 53.8 percent of those of voting age. With an electorate of 28.5 million, this meant a possible political advantage for the Conservatives of 1.2 million votes in an electoral contest where there were only .2 million votes between the two parties.

‘Slumming’ in Swinging London?

ABSTRACT The present article uses Nell Dunns Up the Junction (1963) to explore class, gender and the city in the 1960s. It focuses on three elements: the books representation of post-war, urban working-class identity; the place of gender and sexuality within that representation; and, finally, Nell Dunns own position as a middle-class observer. It argues for the continuing relevance and dynamism of class as a social referent in post-war, ‘affluent’ Britain. The article also explores the meaning of ‘slumming’ in the context of the mid-twentiethcentury city, against the background of ‘affluence’ and the emergence of the ‘permissive society’. What becomes particularly apparent in both contexts is the importance of femininity and female sexuality in the representation of mid-twentieth-century London, whether in terms of the portrayal of working-class women or the position of the middle-class author.

War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s

A t the height of the Blitz, the illustrated weekly Picture Post offered a photo-essay on wartime London enduring the privations of bombing. Below a shot of a woman putting on makeup in the Underground, a caption read: “Here All One’s Life is Public. Privacy, so highly cherished by Britons, is gone. Family life at evening has vanished. Here nothing is intimate. One talks, eats, sleeps, lives, with a hundred, a thousand others.” With other pictures of everyday life in the shelter, of people getting along during raids, the photo-essay celebrated the ordinary qualities of “patience, cheerfulness, resignation, friendship, even gaiety, and, most of all, helpfulness” that would save London and the nation from the Luftwaffe. Photographs thus helped construct the discourse of a national community mobilized and reinvigorated by the demands and experience of total war, and a familiar theme of many cultural histories of the Second World War has been this relationship between culture and “societal regeneration.” Though there has been considerable work on wartime cinema in this regard, there is much less literature on wartime photography. But still photographs were as crucial, and certainly more ubiquitous, than cinema in constructing a visual discourse of the People’s War. Such visual discourses com-

Space, Emotions and the Everyday: The Affective Ecology of 1980s London

This article explores the relationship between emotions, space and politics in 1980s London, using the Greater London Council, childcare, and racial harassment as particular foci. It brings together political history, the history of emotions, and geography to offer a new way of thinking about political culture, as well as contributing to the history of the 1980s. It is based upon archival sources.

The Sphere of Sexual Politics: The Abortion Law Reform Association, 1930s to 1960s

This chapter argues that the work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) produces meaning about categories of identity and experience, such as gender and sexuality. Abortion is the issue at the centre of this examination. The ongoing efforts of NGOs like the Abortion Law Reform Association [hereafter ALRA] to widen access to legal abortion between the 1930s and the 1960s constructed particular ideas of femininity and heterosexuality in the public sphere.

Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class womens inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

The labour party and the 1945 general election

This article examines the Labour Partys experience of the general election of 1945. Using a variety of unpublished and published sources, it reviews the partys strategy, policy, and organisation at the end of the Second World War. It also considers the relationship between the election victory and the state of wartime public opinion. In 1945 there occurred the conjuncture of a number of factors rare in Labours history: a cautiously sympathetic public, a tired Conservative Party, and, not least, a moment of coherence and unity within the party itself. What this article stresses is the particular coincidence of such elements in 1945, all of which contributed to the Labour victory.