The British Labour Party: The Conflict Between Socialist Ideals and Practical Politics between the Wars

1965 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard W. Lyman
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
British Labour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
Contrasting View ◽  
War Aims ◽  
Post War ◽  
Fabian Society

The purpose of this paper is to set forth, somewhat arbitrarily, a composite view of the British Labour Party's history between the Wars, to be labelled the orthodox Labour interpretation, and then to set against it a contrasting view which has been expressed by several left-wing writers within the Labour Party. This examination of conflicting opinions can scarcely be dignified with the title historiographical inquiry. In the first place, there are other more or less coherent interpretations of Labour Party history in this period besides the two sketched herein, most notably a Communist view, expressed in such works as Allen Hutt's The Post-War History of the British Working Class. Secondly, as Stephen Graubard has recently said in relation to the Fabian Society, much of the Labour Party history in this period is in fact autobiography. Finally, as will soon become distressingly apparent, the interpretations that most writers have given of Labour between the Wars have been influenced by, connected with, even in some cases identical to the same authors' views on Labour today. History used to be called “past politics”; in this case it cannot entirely escape becoming “present politics.”According to the orthodox view, the Labour Party was emerging from its infancy in the 1920s, having established its claim to be considered a major contestant for power as recently as 1918. As Francis Williams puts it:With the acceptance of the new constitution and the endorsement of the international policy contained in the Memorandum on War Aims and the domestic programme contained in Labour and the New Social Order, the Labour Party finally established itself. The formative years were ended. Now at last it was an adult party certain of its own purpose; aware also at last of what it must do to impress that purpose upon the nation.

The Early History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–9

1958 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Pelling
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Early History ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
British Labour ◽  
History Of

THE Communist Party of Great Britain, like the Communist Parties of most other European countries, was founded shortly after the Russian Bolshevik revolution. It was unique among the Communist Parties of the major countries in being the result of an amalgamation of small revolutionary groups rather than a product of the schism of a large existing organization. The British Labour Party did not split as a result of the Russian revolution: the Communist Party grew up out of elements which for the most part had had a separate existence on the Labour Party's left wing.

scholarly journals Axis Internationalism: Spanish Health Experts and the Nazi ‘New Europe’, 1939–1945

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID BRYDAN
Keyword(s):  
International Health ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Shared Commitment ◽  
Spanish Health ◽  
Health Experts

AbstractMany of the forms and practices of interwar internationalism were recreated under the auspices of the Nazi ‘New Europe’. This article will examine these forms of ‘Axis internationalism’ by looking at Spanish health experts' involvement with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Despite the ambiguous relationship between the Franco regime and the Axis powers, a wide range of Spanish health experts formed close ties with colleagues from Nazi Germany and across Axis and occupied Europe. Many of those involved were relatively conservative figures who also worked with liberal international health organisations in the pre- and post-war eras. Despite their political differences, their opposing attitudes towards eugenics and the tensions caused by German hegemony, Spanish experts were able to rationalise their involvement with Nazi Germany as a mutually-beneficial continuation of pre-war international health cooperation amongst countries united by a shared commitment to modern, ‘totalitarian’ forms of public health. Despite the hostility of Nazi Germany and its European collaborators to both liberal and left-wing forms of internationalism, this phenomenon suggests that the ‘New Europe’ deserves to be studied as part of the wider history of internationalism in general and of international health in particular.

scholarly journals The fate of one university in the context of changing borders in Central Europe (Kolozsvár — Cluj — Szeged)

2021 ◽  
pp. 353-385
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Stykalin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Educational Institution ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Old Kingdom ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

An example of how epoch-making historical events in Central Europe affected the fate of an elite educational institution is the history of the second Hungarian university, founded in 1872 in the main city of Transylvania, Kolozsvár. This university was forced to leave Transylvania as a result of its reunification with the Kingdom of Romania in December 1918 following the First World War. Romanian professors from the “Old Kingdom” entered the university buildings built in the era of Austro-Hungarian dualism, located in the same city that changed its name from Kolozsvár, to Cluj. They were tasked by the new authorities to facilitate the integration of the region into Romania. The Hungarian University moves within the new borders of Hungary, to the city of Szeged. The creating of this powerful center of elite Hungarian culture became one of the essential directions of the cultural policy of the conservative regime. Its representatives saw the transformation of Hungary into a bastion of high European culture on the threshold of the Balkans as one of the ways to compensate for the enormous national infringement that the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920 was for millions of Hungarians. The resettlement to Szeged, however, by no means put an end to the history of the Hungarian University of Transylvania. After the second Vienna arbitration for the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary (August 1940), the Hungarian university in Cluj was restored, and the Romanian one moved within the narrowed borders of Romania. In the post-war Romania, under the left-wing authorities, and later the communist regime, which was not interested in aggravating the Hungarian-Romanian contradictions, both Romanian and Hungarian universities functioned in Cluj for a decade and a half, until in 1959, amid the rise of Romanian nationalism, an independent Hungarian university was closed.

G.N. Clark and the Oxford School of Modern History, 1919–1922: Hidden Origins of 1066 And All That*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (572) ◽  
pp. 127-156
Author(s):  
Jon Rosebank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Modern History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Reading History ◽  
Regius Professor

Abstract W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That is a satirical history of England, published in 1930. It has long been thought to be a parody of popular history textbooks, characteristic of a generation of post-war writers disillusioned with the tone of patriotic English exceptionalism of many books. This paper explores contemporary critiques of history textbooks in the first third of the twentieth century and finds, however, that 1066 And All That is unusual in its implied criticism. It suggests that the standpoint of its authors reflects more than simply the recoil of their generation of ex-servicemen. It proposes that the book reflects their own particular experience of reading history at Oxford in 1919–22, at a time when teaching in the Modern History School still included much that was literary and whiggish. G.N. Clark had been their tutor, a historian close to C.H. Firth, Regius Professor of Modern History, and sympathetic to Firth’s long and controversial campaign for reform. While Clark’s later reputation was as a cautious scholar, as a young man he was a witty iconoclast, active in left-wing politics. We trace his influence on Sellar and Yeatman through the lectures they attended, and discover that 1066 And All That bears clear references to Clark’s reformist views on history at Oxford.

scholarly journals THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE IMPROVEMENT OF MINDS: THE CASE OF TONY CROSLAND

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEREMY NUTTALL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
British Labour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ability And Willingness

This article uses the broad concept of ‘improvement of minds’ to refer to the idea of improving people's sense of morality, their ability and willingness to reason, and the depth of their emotional experiences. Such an objective has been little explored in the context of the history of the British Labour party. Yet, discussion of it is worth integrating into histories of the party for two reasons. First, the goal of improving minds was a strand – though often unsystematically developed – in the agendas of many Labour party politicians, activists, and thinkers. Secondly, the very fact that it was an unsystematically developed strand, the very limits of the party's attention to, and success in achieving, ‘mental progress’ amongst the twentieth-century British population – that is to say, simply, the limits to the party's pursuit and achievement of the objective of making people more caring, rational, and sensitive – is one important explanation for many of Labour's failures. The article begins to explore the aims, processes, and outcomes of Labour's attempts to improve minds, as well as to explain and examine the consequences of the limits of the party's attention to this goal, through the case study of Tony Crosland.

Revisionists and Fundamentalists: the Labour Party and Economic Policy during the Second World War

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
Political Consensus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

‘Labour Comes of Age’, Kingsley Martin observed a few days after the party's electoral landslide of 1945. This might have been more precise if a chorus had added, sotto voce, ‘…And Comes Into an Inheritance’, for since the publication of Paul Addison's The road to 1945 (1975), the history of the Labour party during and after the war has been dominated by the notion of a political consensus forged during the Churchill coalition and left as a legacy to the Attlee government. According to Addison, it was the consensus of Keynes and Beveridge that shaped post-war politics rather than any distinctive contribution from Labour.

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