By 1939, the coal industry, like all industries, was facing the pressure of war, bringing an increased concern not only for the state of the industry, but for the health of its workers. The government’s preoccupation with production in preparation for war had long overtaken any particular attention to health and safety measures. The prevailing policy culture provided minimal financial compensation to workers incapacitated through respiratory illnesses. While historians have investigated the history of occupational health in the coalfield, no detailed analysis has been undertaken on the government’s response. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of the area experiencing the highest incidence of respiratory illnesses in wartime – the south Wales coalfield. It will examine the steps attempted by the government and the trade unions to address these issues, and show how the experiences in south Wales provided the platform for national changes in coalmining practices.
{"title":"‘Produce More Coal’ = ‘Produce More Silicosis’? Re-training, Re-employment, and Respiratory Illnesses in the South Wales Coalfield, 1938–1945","authors":"M. Crowley","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.10","url":null,"abstract":"By 1939, the coal industry, like all industries, was facing the pressure of war, bringing an increased concern not only for the state of the industry, but for the health of its workers. The government’s preoccupation with production in preparation for war had long overtaken any particular attention to health and safety measures. The prevailing policy culture provided minimal financial compensation to workers incapacitated through respiratory illnesses. While historians have investigated the history of occupational health in the coalfield, no detailed analysis has been undertaken on the government’s response. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of the area experiencing the highest incidence of respiratory illnesses in wartime – the south Wales coalfield. It will examine the steps attempted by the government and the trade unions to address these issues, and show how the experiences in south Wales provided the platform for national changes in coalmining practices.","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.10","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48275756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the support that existed for the Spanish Republic within the British Co-operative movement and asks what light this can shed on existing debates about the character of civil society and democratic engagement in the age of mass democracy. While much has been written about popular support for the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939, the Co-operative movement has remained somewhat in the shadows, and the movement’s response to the Spanish Civil War is yet to take centre stage. Similarly, while the British Co-operative movement played an important role within inter-war civil society, engaging many newly enfranchised working-class citizens with the democratic concerns of the day, studies of Britain’s inter-war civic culture have tended to focus on the middle classes, and the Co-operative movement has been overlooked. With a particular focus on the movement’s journals, and on the published ‘letters to the editor’, which reveal how ordinary co-operators engaged with ‘Spain’, the article ...
{"title":"2016 Labour History Review Essay Prize Winner","authors":"Emily Mason","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.9","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the support that existed for the Spanish Republic within the British Co-operative movement and asks what light this can shed on existing debates about the character of civil society and democratic engagement in the age of mass democracy. While much has been written about popular support for the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939, the Co-operative movement has remained somewhat in the shadows, and the movement’s response to the Spanish Civil War is yet to take centre stage. Similarly, while the British Co-operative movement played an important role within inter-war civil society, engaging many newly enfranchised working-class citizens with the democratic concerns of the day, studies of Britain’s inter-war civic culture have tended to focus on the middle classes, and the Co-operative movement has been overlooked. With a particular focus on the movement’s journals, and on the published ‘letters to the editor’, which reveal how ordinary co-operators engaged with ‘Spain’, the article ...","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.9","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41363899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Conventional accounts of the decision of a group of influential British Labour MPs to leave the party in 1981 to found the new Social Democratic Party (SDP) focus on more immediate intra-party constitutional reforms after 1979, or on party divisions over the single question of Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). This article suggests that a wider array of longer-term factors informed the decision to seek an alternative vehicle of social democracy, particularly the critical response to the so-called ‘trade union question’ in British and Labour politics from the late 1960s in a wider ‘post-revisionist’ critique of traditional social democracy. It identifies the centrality and cumulative role of a new ‘post-revisionist’ social democratic critique of the privileged position and influence of an increasingly assertive (left-wing) trade unionism after the failure of Labour’s In Place of Strife legislation in 1969 in the later schism of British social democracy.
{"title":"A ‘Brooding Oppressive Shadow’? The Labour Alliance, the ‘Trade Union Question’, and the Trajectory of Revisionist Social Democracy, c. 1969–1975","authors":"S. Meredith","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.11","url":null,"abstract":"Conventional accounts of the decision of a group of influential British Labour MPs to leave the party in 1981 to found the new Social Democratic Party (SDP) focus on more immediate intra-party constitutional reforms after 1979, or on party divisions over the single question of Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). This article suggests that a wider array of longer-term factors informed the decision to seek an alternative vehicle of social democracy, particularly the critical response to the so-called ‘trade union question’ in British and Labour politics from the late 1960s in a wider ‘post-revisionist’ critique of traditional social democracy. It identifies the centrality and cumulative role of a new ‘post-revisionist’ social democratic critique of the privileged position and influence of an increasingly assertive (left-wing) trade unionism after the failure of Labour’s In Place of Strife legislation in 1969 in the later schism of British social democracy.","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.11","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46949548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article offers a comparative analysis of the British national election in 1945 and the Australian federal election in 1946. Both elections resulted in Labour victories. Through an in-depth analysis of these election campaigns, the study aims to identify similarities and differences in the form of ideological appeals, and especially in the deployment of the languages of ‘class’ and ‘nation’. It thereby seeks to shed new light on the changing form of electoral appeals, the nature of post-war Labour ideology, and the contribution of both of these to Labour’s political success.
{"title":"Labour’s Finest Hour: Labour Electoral Victories after the Second World War in Britain and Australia, 1945 and 1946","authors":"Alex Burston-Chorowicz","doi":"10.3828/lhr.2017.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/lhr.2017.6","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a comparative analysis of the British national election in 1945 and the Australian federal election in 1946. Both elections resulted in Labour victories. Through an in-depth analysis of these election campaigns, the study aims to identify similarities and differences in the form of ideological appeals, and especially in the deployment of the languages of ‘class’ and ‘nation’. It thereby seeks to shed new light on the changing form of electoral appeals, the nature of post-war Labour ideology, and the contribution of both of these to Labour’s political success.","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/lhr.2017.6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44752728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The decision of the British Labour Government in 1945 to maintain the policy of its predecessor, declining to intervene in Spain to bring about the removal of the government of General Franco, caused disappointment to many in labour movements both in Britain and elsewhere across Europe. It has hitherto been thought that this policy was consistently maintained throughout the period when Labour was in power, until 1951. This article draws mainly on Norwegian archival material to show that in 1946, despite its public assertions to the contrary, the British government was actually working both inside and outside Spain to try to remove Franco. It describes how the Norwegians approached their British counterparts to explore the possibility of concerted government action to remove Franco– and how they obtained information about Britain’s undisclosed Spanish policy. It provides a context permitting a fresh interpretation of Foreign Office documents dealing with the consequences of a Labour Party indiscretion in D...
{"title":"Evidence from Norwegian Archives of British Attempts to Remove Franco in 1946","authors":"Tony Insall","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.7","url":null,"abstract":"The decision of the British Labour Government in 1945 to maintain the policy of its predecessor, declining to intervene in Spain to bring about the removal of the government of General Franco, caused disappointment to many in labour movements both in Britain and elsewhere across Europe. It has hitherto been thought that this policy was consistently maintained throughout the period when Labour was in power, until 1951. This article draws mainly on Norwegian archival material to show that in 1946, despite its public assertions to the contrary, the British government was actually working both inside and outside Spain to try to remove Franco. It describes how the Norwegians approached their British counterparts to explore the possibility of concerted government action to remove Franco– and how they obtained information about Britain’s undisclosed Spanish policy. It provides a context permitting a fresh interpretation of Foreign Office documents dealing with the consequences of a Labour Party indiscretion in D...","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48558489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article incorporates the political practice of working-class radicalism into the wider evolution of labour politics in British society. Its chief focus is upon the political language, culture and ideology of working-class activists in a provincial Victorian city – Bristol – between 1867 and 1900. It considers the way working-class radical and labour activists articulated their understandings of ideology and the social order around them, and examines how these conceptions changed in response to wider political and industrial developments. Its central aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to the prevailing historiography on nineteenth-century popular politics, a non-conflictual sense of class could play a crucial and consistent role in working-class radical and labour politics at a local level. For, in Bristol, working-class radicals and their labour successors did not see themselves as part of a trans-class movement of ‘the people’, but as organic representatives and spokespersons of ‘their class’. By ...
{"title":"Class without Conflict: Popular Political Continuity in Late Victorian Bristol, 1867–1900","authors":"M. Kidd","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.5","url":null,"abstract":"This article incorporates the political practice of working-class radicalism into the wider evolution of labour politics in British society. Its chief focus is upon the political language, culture and ideology of working-class activists in a provincial Victorian city – Bristol – between 1867 and 1900. It considers the way working-class radical and labour activists articulated their understandings of ideology and the social order around them, and examines how these conceptions changed in response to wider political and industrial developments. Its central aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to the prevailing historiography on nineteenth-century popular politics, a non-conflictual sense of class could play a crucial and consistent role in working-class radical and labour politics at a local level. For, in Bristol, working-class radicals and their labour successors did not see themselves as part of a trans-class movement of ‘the people’, but as organic representatives and spokespersons of ‘their class’. By ...","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49633719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the Second World War, news about the German persecution and mass murder of Europe’s Jews was received in Britain. The Bund Report of May 1942 stated that the occupying Germans had murdered 700,000 Polish Jews. Its receipt in Britain precipitated a (temporary) shift in how news of the Holocaust was reported. In late June and early July 1942, British newspapers published reports detailing German atrocities against Jews and, on 9 July 1942, the British Minister of Information hosted a conference that highlighted them. The left in Britain – the British Labour Party, exiled socialist parties, and other organizations – sought to respond to the terrible news from Poland. This paper explores that response. I focus on the important but much-overlooked protest meeting that took place on 2 September 1942 at Caxton Hall, Westminster. I argue that an analysis of the meeting – the preparation, the event, and its aftermath – sheds a great deal of light on how the left responded to news of the Holocaust, on the li...
{"title":"The Limits of Solidarity: The 1942 Protest Meeting at Caxton Hall against German Atrocities","authors":"Michael Fleming","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.2","url":null,"abstract":"During the Second World War, news about the German persecution and mass murder of Europe’s Jews was received in Britain. The Bund Report of May 1942 stated that the occupying Germans had murdered 700,000 Polish Jews. Its receipt in Britain precipitated a (temporary) shift in how news of the Holocaust was reported. In late June and early July 1942, British newspapers published reports detailing German atrocities against Jews and, on 9 July 1942, the British Minister of Information hosted a conference that highlighted them. The left in Britain – the British Labour Party, exiled socialist parties, and other organizations – sought to respond to the terrible news from Poland. This paper explores that response. I focus on the important but much-overlooked protest meeting that took place on 2 September 1942 at Caxton Hall, Westminster. I argue that an analysis of the meeting – the preparation, the event, and its aftermath – sheds a great deal of light on how the left responded to news of the Holocaust, on the li...","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43877931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The state of Northern Ireland was founded in 1921 and consolidated in the inter-war period. Analysts have claimed that this was accomplished through religious discrimination and populist patronage, despite the existence of Article V of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. Utilizing a case study approach, this article examines how two pieces of legislation impacted on the labour movement in the region in the period 1921 to 1939. The Special Powers Act (first passed in 1922, and a permanent act from 1933), and the Trade Disputes Act, 1927, were both legislated by the inter-war Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) government of Northern Ireland. Labour activists suffered political discrimination, while they were intimidated through the legislation and organization was curtailed. These restrictions were carried out on the basis that the labour movement was considered a ‘disloyal’ section of the Northern Ireland populace. The article concludes that during the period 1921 to 1939 the state of Northern Ireland state was ...
{"title":"The Moral Economy of Loyalty: Labour, Law, and the State in Northern Ireland, 1921–1939","authors":"C. Loughlin","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.1","url":null,"abstract":"The state of Northern Ireland was founded in 1921 and consolidated in the inter-war period. Analysts have claimed that this was accomplished through religious discrimination and populist patronage, despite the existence of Article V of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. Utilizing a case study approach, this article examines how two pieces of legislation impacted on the labour movement in the region in the period 1921 to 1939. The Special Powers Act (first passed in 1922, and a permanent act from 1933), and the Trade Disputes Act, 1927, were both legislated by the inter-war Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) government of Northern Ireland. Labour activists suffered political discrimination, while they were intimidated through the legislation and organization was curtailed. These restrictions were carried out on the basis that the labour movement was considered a ‘disloyal’ section of the Northern Ireland populace. The article concludes that during the period 1921 to 1939 the state of Northern Ireland state was ...","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48643540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book review: Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid (eds), Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)","authors":"Keith Laybourn","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70532103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article is concerned with different factions within the British peace movement during the 1950s and early 1960s, each of which gave the word ‘peace’ a different meaning. We argue that the movement was made up of several, often contradictory sections, and despite attempts by groups like the Peace Pledge Union to distance themselves from the communistcontrolled British Peace Committee, popular perceptions were tainted by association with communism until the mid-1950s. Following the onset of the H-bomb era, this taint lessened as people began to fear the destructiveness of hydrogen weapons. When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament formed in 1958 it became the predominant British organization opposed to nuclear weapons and achieved popularity because it limited its objective to nuclear disarmament whereas the Peace Pledge Union demanded the condemnation of all war.
{"title":"‘Peace with a Capital P’: The Spectre of Communism and Competing Notions of ‘Peace’ in Britain, 1949–1960","authors":"N. Barnett, E. Smith","doi":"10.3828/LHR.2017.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LHR.2017.3","url":null,"abstract":"This article is concerned with different factions within the British peace movement during the 1950s and early 1960s, each of which gave the word ‘peace’ a different meaning. We argue that the movement was made up of several, often contradictory sections, and despite attempts by groups like the Peace Pledge Union to distance themselves from the communistcontrolled British Peace Committee, popular perceptions were tainted by association with communism until the mid-1950s. Following the onset of the H-bomb era, this taint lessened as people began to fear the destructiveness of hydrogen weapons. When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament formed in 1958 it became the predominant British organization opposed to nuclear weapons and achieved popularity because it limited its objective to nuclear disarmament whereas the Peace Pledge Union demanded the condemnation of all war.","PeriodicalId":43028,"journal":{"name":"Labour History Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/LHR.2017.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70532006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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