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The British Labour Party, after 14 years out of office, is grappling with a dynamic global strategic environment that has been transformed during that period. It has committed to a 'NATO-first' defence and security policy and presided over the United Kingdom's military pullback 'east of Suez' in the 1960s and 1970s, raising questions about the fate of the 'Indo-Pacific tilt' unveiled by the Conservative government three years ago. With its Strategic Defence Review and its first full budget, the new government has the opportunity to take ownership of the tilt. There may be synergies among capabilities that can add value in both the Euro-Atlantic and Asia-Pacific regions, in particular with respect to aircraft carriers, submarines and new fighter aircraft. The UK's paramount challenge is to achieve the right balance between integrated and sovereign capabilities so as to add value without overstretching limited resources or descending to mere tokenism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Green New Deal (GND) has emerged as a crucial progressive agenda for sustainability transition, but there have been few attempts to develop it into a concrete programme for government. This paper considers one such attempt – the GND proposals put forth by the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – and how it tackled three key challenges faced by the broader GND agenda: its reliance on the state, its relationship with capital, and its Western centrism. The paper argues that these challenges gave rise to tensions within Labour’s proposals: treating the state both as an instrument and as an object of change, ambivalence towards capitalism as an economic system and struggling to reconcile the competing forces of nationalism and internationalism. By examining these challenges and Labour's efforts to overcome them, this study provides valuable insights into the messy politics of enacting Green New Deal visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the analysis of the historiography of the British Labour Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author tries to systematize an array of scientific literature on this theme based on the problem-chronological approach. The works were divided into four main groups: 1) the works of theorists and the Labour movement activists, 2) the studies devoted to the general history of the formation and activities of the Labour Party of this period, 3) the works devoted to the history of the relationship between church organizations and British Labour Party 4) Ukrainian researches in the field of British Labour history. The author proposes to outline 3 chronological periods in the scientific study of the history of the British Labour Party when a great amount of works has appeared. As we can see, the first period was 1930-1940’s, when the vast amount of the works of prominent leaders and active members of the Labour movement and the Labour Party were published. The second period, as we can outline, was in the 1950’s – the beginning of the 1960’s when the Labour Party lost its positions in the political sphere of Great Britain. And the third period is nowadays when in the early 2000’s Labour Party’s 100th anniversary was celebrated and besides it, the Party achieved the greatest success - it won parliamentary election three times in a row (1997, 2001 and 2005). The author concluded that the history of the British labor movement of the second half of the 19th – the first third of the 20th centuries and the theme of the party struggle for the electorate among the workers still needed to be reconsidered and re-evaluated. Although there are many works devoted to the British Labour Party history, the reasons for its strengthening, the factors of its rapid growth at the beginning of the 20th century, the causes and consequences of the crisis of 1931, etc. still remain debatable. Therefore, it is not a quiet time to talk about the completeness of the research topic. The author also noted that despite the number of historical researches of modern Ukrainian scholars, Ukrainian British studies still lack investigations with the analysis of the organizational structure of the British Labour party and its leadership.

The article analyses the influence of the leadership of the British Labour Party on the first Cold War dissident, Milovan Djilas. Up until his dissidence in 1954, the main Yugoslav official for official relations with the British Left was Djilas. He had many contacts with the members of the British Labour Party such as Morgan Phillips, Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee. While many of these contacts were professional, Djilas established a firm friendship with Bevan, under whose influence Djilas gradually abandoned communism and embraced the Labour movement. When he called for another party in Yugoslavia (one similar to the Labour Party), he was condemned by Tito's regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to scholarship on the relationship between political parties and social movements by proposing the concept of 'party-driven movements' to understand the formation of a new hybrid model within existing political parties in majoritarian systems. In our two case studies – Momentum's relationship with the UK Labour Party and the Bernie Sanders-inspired 'Our Revolution' with the US Democratic Party – we highlight the conditions under which they emerge and their key characteristics. We analyse how party-driven movements express an ambivalence in terms of strategy (working inside and outside the party), political aims (aiming to transform the party and society) and organisation (in the desire to maintain autonomy while participating within party structures). Our analysis suggests that such party-driven movements provide a potential answer to political parties' alienation from civil society and may thus be a more enduring feature of Anglo-American majoritarian party systems than the current literature suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the academic literature on leadership has identified authenticity as an important leadership attribute, few studies have examined how authentic leadership is evaluated in naturally occurring discourse. This article explores how authentic leadership was characterised and evaluated in the discourse of the British press during the 2015 Labour Party leadership election—won, against the odds, by veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. Using membership categorisation analysis, we show that the media discourse about authentic leadership was both ambiguous and ambivalent. In their representation of authentic leadership, we found that a discourse of 'ethical' leadership was played out in tension with a discourse of 'effective' leadership. We propose that this complex and contradictory discursive landscape is also relevant in business contexts where 'ethical' leaders are subjected to praise for their virtues but also criticism for their ineffectiveness. Future research could usefully study how 'ethical' leaders in different settings can be subject to competing evaluations when their ethical values are discursively contrasted to expectations concerning what it takes to be an 'effective' leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the British-Soviet occupation of Iran during the Second World War, Iran became the key battleground for the international labour movement. The plight of the workers had become an important political issue with the Iranian government in conflict with the socialist Tudeh party for leadership over the trade unions. The Labour government in Britain was also deeply interested in the matter but regarded the Tudeh as too dangerous and too aligned with the Soviet Union to be supported. Within this climate, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) made an official visit to Iran. With its international delegates, they represented different views over the Tudeh, which caused much conflict during the visit. This article sheds crucial light on this important visit and reveals how international the Labour questions were in Iran and how the WFTU visit brought the various tensions to light. This research will also show how the timing of the visit may have impacted on the removal of the Iranian strong-man Ahmad Qavam by the end of 1947. This work is of particular significance as it looks at the previously understudied role and interest of the British government on the Iranian labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom tends to oppose the 1970s British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party in what concerns their views on the economy. The former, intermittently in office since 1945, accepted to lead austerity policies, perceived as the only means to defeat spiralling inflation and balance of payments imbalances. On the other hand, the latter and its communist allies supported a radical economic alternative based on a substantial enlargement of public sector and a constraining planning system. A more careful reading of the programmes designed by both parties in the early 1970s allows us to significantly revise this assessment. The sections of these documents that address economic issues actually offered astonishing resemblances, all of them being based on nationalisation, a reinforcement of planning mechanisms and a plea for industrial democracy. This article aims at reflecting upon the main causes of this economic convergency. By combining a transnational approach with a careful attention to the national framework in which both parties developed their policies, the article shows that the common economic culture emerging in the programmes can only be understood by examining the case of the economic experts involved in the drafting of these documents. While rejecting explanations in terms of Sonderweg, this work suggests to consider the relationship between the British and French socialists as an interesting case study of transnationalization of economic culture in the Western European social-democracy and of its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contributions to Contemporary History / Prispevki za Novejšo Zgodovino is the property of Prispevki za Novejso Zgodovino and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi is the property of Tarih Incelemeleri Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article aims at assessing the functioning and characteristics of the most recent systems employed by the British Labour Party for selecting its leader. To this end I compared five leadership races: the huge success of Tony Blair in 1994 in the newly reformed electoral college system; the undisputed election of Gordon Brown in 2007; the narrow and disputed victory of Ed Miliband in 2010, still held under the electoral college system; the large but controversial successes of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 and 2016 closed primaries. The article first traces the evolution of the Labour leadership election systems in recent decades. Secondly, the five leadership races are analyzed and compared, taking into account two main variables: inclusiveness and divisiveness. These have been addressed looking at indicators such as selectorate and candidacy inclusiveness, campaign negativity, race competitiveness and elite attitude, which transversally affects all the other dimensions. The findings suggest that intra-party democracy may be dangerous for party unity and electability but the political context remains much more important than the intrinsic characteristics of the system of leadership selection used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of this special issue examining policy transfer between the Labour parties in Australia and Britain, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between the two on ideological positioning. In the 1990s there was substantial ideas transfer from the Australian Hawke–Keating government to Blair ‘New Labour’ in Britain, as both parties made a lunge towards the economic centre. This paper analyses how the inheritors of that shift, the Rudd/Gillard government in Australia and the Miliband and Corbyn leaderships in Britain, are seeking to define the role and purpose of Labour parties in its wake. It examines the extent to which they are learning and borrowing from one another, and finds that a combination of divergent economic and political contexts have led to strikingly limited contemporary policy transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article attempts a revision of conventional narratives of the history of the move to expel the People's Action Party of Singapore from the Socialist International in 1976. While the advocates for the PAP's expulsion were both the Dutch Partij van de Arbeid and the British Labour Party, the PAP at the time reserved its strongest criticism for the Labour Party and Government. By focusing therefore on the British role in the events of 1976 - or at least, what the Singapore government claimed the British involvement to have been - this article seeks to contextualize the dispute between the PAP and the Labour Party within a wider (and larger) discourse of Labour Party concern for perceived violations of civil rights in Singapore, even as the Singapore government itself became increasingly disillusioned with what they perceived as British irresponsibility in foreign policy. This article therefore highlights the precise difficulties faced by Her Majesty's Government in 1976, both domestically in coming to terms with keeping its own Labour Party members in line, and also externally in managing relations with Lee Kuan Yew and the Singapore government. Ultimately, this article offers new narratives, not just for British Labour history but also as a clarifying revision of existing Singapore history that has been content for far too long with inaccuracies in terms of how the British role has been portrayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immediately after the First World War the British Labour Party was forced to reconsider its relationship with an increasingly militant Irish nationalism. This reassessment occurred at the same time as it was becoming a major political and electoral force in post-war Britain. The political imperative from the party's perspective was to portray itself as a responsible, moderate and patriotic alternative governing party. Thus it was fearful of the potential negative impact of too close an association with, and perceived sympathy for, extreme Irish nationalism. This explains the party's often bewildering changes in policy on Ireland at various party conferences in 1919 and 1920, ranging from support for home rule to federalism throughout the United Kingdom to 'dominion home rule' as part of a wider evolving British Commonwealth to adopting outright ' self-determination' for a completely independent Ireland outside both United Kingdom and empire. On one aspect of its Irish policy, however, the party was adamant and united - its opposition to the partition of Ireland, which was the fundamental principle of Lloyd George's Government of Ireland Bill of 1920 which established Northern Ireland. Curiously, that aspect of Labour's Irish policy was never discussed in the party at large. All the running was made by the Parliamentary Labour Party ( PLP) in the house of commons in 1920. The PLP's outright opposition to the bill acted as balm throughout the wider party, binding together the confusing, and often contradictory, positions promulgated on the long-term constitutional future of Ireland and its relationship with Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy debate within the British Labour Party after its traumatic electoral defeat in 2010 has been marked by a concern with Germany's system of economic governance as a potential model for renewal. The desirability of emulating key aspects of its institutions of economic democracy (codetermination) has been a particular subject of debate. This article analyses the source of Germany's attraction for many would-be reformers in the Labour movement. It then examines whether emulating German codetermination is either a feasible or appropriate strategy for Labour reformers whose goal is to rebalance power between capital and labour. Codetermination is deeply embedded in a wider set of governance institutions that have been subject to substantial reform in recent years. It concludes that effective institutional borrowing from Germany would require a far broader and more radical set of economic governance reforms than Labour reformers appear to recognise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The global financial crisis provides an opportune moment to analyse the rise of the City of London financial markets, their role in the globalisation process and an attempt by the Labour Party Left in the 1970s to challenge emerging transnational forces. The USA became the world's ‘hegemon’ after the Second World War, but London retained its power in finance; well placed to challenge the post-war Keynesian regulatory consensus in favour of globalising interests, theoretically and politically served by the rise of neo-liberal ideology. In response the Labour Party Left devised its radical ‘Programme 1973’ and subsequently the Alternative Economic Strategy, which in seeking to defend social democracy, understood the necessity to prevent the erosion of national financial controls. The 1976 International Monetary Fund crisis was a defining moment in this battle. This article includes interviews with key contemporary actors and is based in the discipline of International Political Economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The British Labour Party became increasingly aware after the First World War that it was potentially a government in waiting. In opposition the party was generally supportive of Irish nationalism. It supported Home Rule and was adamantly opposed to the partition of Ireland contained in the 1920 Government of Ireland Bill. Despite the fact that the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was inconsistent with Labour Party Irish policy, cementing as it did the partition of Ireland as well as hardly being an exercise in 'self-determination', both Labour MPs in the debate on the Treaty as well as the Labour press supported the Treaty as it offered a way out of the Irish imbroglio and a return to rational class-based politics. The overriding concern of, in particular, the parliamentary leadership of the Labour Party by now was to prove to the British electorate that it could be as protective of British state interests as its rivals. The article argues that this pragmatic about-turn was adopted as many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in particular were acutely aware that the party needed to be seen as patriotic, moderate, and responsible if it was to stand any chance of being elected to power. The article traces this reversal in policy by reference to contemporary parliamentary debates as well as through the columns of the contemporary Labour press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses British politics following the May 2010 general election. It is noted that David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party was expected to win easy election to replace the Labour Party prime minister Gordon Brown. The article examines British party politics beginning in 1979 and considers aspects of the time in office of Conservative Party prime ministers John Major and Margaret Thatcher. In 2010 Cameron was forced to form a coalition government with Great Britain's Liberal Democrats.

The response of national, state-level political parties to the challenges of competing for power at the devolved, regional levels is a neglected research topic. This article seeks to remedy this by analysing how the British Labour Party has responded to these challenges at the sub- national level following UK devolution. British Labour remains formally a unitary party despite devolution. Nonetheless, the national party leadership has allowed the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties considerable freedom, in practice, to select candidates, conduct regional-level elections and implement some distinctive policies. Meanwhile, the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties have shifted significantly from being traditional, centralized parties with a single hierarchical organization towards being more pluralist, less hierarchical organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the formation of the British Labour Party's colonial policy towards Africa. It traces how the early Radical Liberal critique of colonial rule gave way to the influence of Fabianism, which provided the guidelines to the Labour government's post-war development measures. These sought to incorporate Africans into institutions which would simultaneously provide more productive labour and consolidate colonial rule. The development of the African colonies was believed to reside in restructuring the interface between the state and society. A challenge to the Party's Fabian-inspired colonial policy emerged in the 1950s. In the midst of the ideological struggle between the party's left and right wings, arguments questioning the African colonies’ economic subordination to metropolitan interests briefly entered into policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media coverage of the contemporary British Labour party routinely suggests party leaders, notably Tony Blair, have been overly reliant on using focus group as a means of obtaining voter feedback. The paper explores this popular understanding by considering bow and when qualitative forms of opinion research began to play a significant role in developing campaign strategy. Following their incorporation into party planning during the mid-1980s, focus groups provided an increasingly influential (and at the time more discreet) source of data and support for the leadership's Policy Review later that decade. Following the 1992 election defeat selective findings from the party's qualitative research programme became integral to the public relations' initiatives of Labour's self-styled "modernisers," particularly in their largely successful attempt to delegitimise and then marginalise the role of the party's once formidable affiliated anion supporters in internal affairs. Crucially this contributed to a climate that enabled the key moderniser Tony Blair to emerge and win the leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article (based on archival material from the National Archives, Kew, and the Labour archive in Manchester) is to explore the relationship between the British Labour Party and the Italian Socialist Party during the Wilson governments and the Italian centre-left coalitions between 1964 and 1970. The inclusion of the PSI within the Italian government was very much appreciated (and promoted) by Labour as it was expected it would be of great help with regard to issues such as the Multilateral Force or Britain's second application to join the EEC. For this reason, the British Labour government did its best to support the success of the centre-left formula and was similarly very active in promoting socialist reunification, which was eventually achieved in 1966. As regards the PSI's occasional radical departures in foreign policy matters — as, for instance, in relation to Vietnam — the Italian socialists' 'filial admiration' for their British counterparts enabled Labour on more than one occasion to bring Nenni's party into line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1955 West Germany joined NATO, while East Germany joined the Warsaw Pact. The GDR was not recognized by Britain, as it followed the FRG's Halistein doctrine, according to which the FRG was the only legitimate German state. The Labour Party officially had no relations with the GDR, but after 1955 an increasing number of Labour MPs, including some senior figures, travelled to the GDR and openly voiced their opinion that the GDR should be recognized. Such visits produced tensions between the SPD and the Labour Party. The article analyses why the Labour Party risked those tensions. It asks where it differed in its assessment and its priorities from the SPD. And it explores how it sought to overcome the Cold War division of the continent by propagating a new Ostpolitik which preceded the better-known Ostpolitik pursued by Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr in the FRG after 1963. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1945 and 1947 the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (MSzDP) and the British Labour Party developed a relationship which resulted in regular contacts, visits and communications between the two parties. From the British perspective a major motivation in pursuing this relationship was to discourage the Hungarian Socialists from making themselves subservient to the Communist Party, which at that time was very influential. The summer of 1947 was the most intense period of this unusual Anglo-Hungarian relationship, with leading British diplomatic and Labour Party figures actively encouraging the MSzDP to take a stand against Communist demands. This work examines the relationship between the British Foreign Office and Labour Party and the MSzDP in the context of the events that surrounded the general election that was held in Hungary in the summer of 1947. It focuses predominantly on events in Hungary but it also examines an unusual set of discussions that took place in London in September 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies a modelling approach to examine the establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in England. RDAs are an important part of New Labour's policy programme for regional economic development, and their implementation requires the involvement of actors at both central and local government levels. The three phases of negotiations that took place between these actors are studied using alternative models of collective decision-making, including a cooperative exchange model and a non-cooperative conflict model. Data on the key elements of the decision-making process - including the issues discussed during the negotiations, the actors' policy positions and capabilities, and the levels of salience they attached to the issues - were collected systematically and form the basis of the analysis. Application of the models allows inferences to be drawn regarding the nature of the decision-making process that took place prior to the policy outcomes. These analyses are supported by the estimates of the utility gains and losses experienced by the actors as a result of the policy outcomes that were realized. The results demonstrate that Labour has pursued a largely consensual approach based on exchange and log-rolling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active participation in political parties is an important condition for the functioning of political democracy. On the political Left, however, the role of the party activist is under pressure from both internal and external changes in the political culture. Catching up with continental European socialist parties, the leadership of the British Labour Party has progressively changed policy priorities and now its socialist ideology. Externally, 'new social movements' are said to be promoting new political aims and new forms of activism. A case-study of the influence of these factors on the commitment and participation of members, and ex-members, of a typical southern constituency Labour Party suggests that 'new social movements' do not constitute a rival attraction to these members, ex-members, and activists. Their commitment is, however, being reduced by personal economic and social pressures and their dissonant adherence to traditional values of British socialism. To the extent that political involvement depends on motivation by values or ideological principles this study suggests a decline in party political activism, and a possible obstacle to a 'grass roots' recovery by Labour in Southern England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the relative influence of organizational vs. class power in affecting the timing and the shape of the British welfare reforms of 1908-1911. Rather than viewing these reforms as either the outcome of the direct pressure of business or as an internal response from a newly bureaucratized state to solve social problems, this analysis finds more evidence for a perspective that emphasizes the more indirect, more mediated class biases inherent in the British slate as setting the context within which action on welfare reform occurred. Specifically, I argue that state managers used their newly developed organizational capacity to shape the Liberal reforms according to their own purposes but these purposes were limited by several class-based factors. The historical conclusions point to a synthesis of the relative autonomy approaches to the capitalist state advanced in the neo-Marxist work of Poulantzas, Offe, and Block. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report examines the internal struggles that have taken place in the British Labour Party since 1979 to make gender a salient political issue and to increase the representation of women. I argue that the culture and organization of the Labour Party in 1979 provided an inhospitable terrain for women to organize around gender issues, but that since that time women have been able to use the spaces created by other agendas for party adaptation and change, particularly demands for party democratization and party modernization, to develop a gender-party dynamic which has allowed women to press their claims more effectively, but only in ways that are congruent with the leadership's modernization strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]