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In 1973 the national conference of the National Union of Students (NUS) voted to campaign for gay rights, making NUS the first national organisation in the UK to make such a public commitment. Using archive material, this article outlines how NUS came to this decision, and the initial challenges it faced in taking up this work. It explains that NUS was influenced by early liberation politics, but faced difficulties when this clashed with the belief of some on the Left in the primacy of the class struggle. Nevertheless, some important progress was made in these early years, even if some of the wider societal change was still elusive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It analyses the group's development, actions, communications, as well as surrounding media discourses, subsequent police investigation, and the criminal trials of ten individuals for their involvement in the Angry Brigade. The article reappraises their overlooked historical significance among the wider countercultural militancy and discourses of political violence of the late 1960s to early 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three decades after the events themselves and with full access to the public record, historians and political scientists are now well placed to revisit and re-evaluate the 'Winter of Discontent'. This article reflects on the first book-length studies of the period published since the opening of the archives. I argue that although neither study profoundly alters our view of this crucial episode and its place in the pre-history of Thatcherism, taken together the evidence they uncover might provide the basis for an alternative assessment. Ultimately, however, such an assessment requires more attention to methodology and, above all, an approach to the archives and to witness testimony that is both more inductive and more deductive than that exhibited in the existing literature. In the process I hope to clarify what we now know and we have still to learn about the winter of 1978-79 and the popular mythology to which it gave rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]