Twentieth Century British History - Advance Access

Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931. By Susan Kingsley Kent.

Beers, L. — 2009-06-23

From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870-1918. By Mary A. Conley.

O'hara, G. — 2009-06-23

The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939-1945. By Martin Francis.

Rose, S. O. — 2009-06-15

Downing Street Diary: Volume Two. By Bernard Donoughue.

McNally, T. — 2009-06-02

Twentieth Century Diplomacy: A Case Study of British Practice, 1963-1976. By John W. Young.

Ashton, N. J. — 2009-05-18

Labour and the Politics of Internationalism, 1906-1914

McNeilly, E. — 2009-05-15

Historians have traditionally characterized the early Labour party as an insular, ‘labourist’ organization out of sync with the mainstream of European socialism and indifferent to foreign affairs and internationalism. However, this perspective is deeply misguided, as Labour's ‘Big Four’—MacDonald, Snowden, Hardie and Glasier—used their positions of authority in the Labour Party, Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the British Section of the International to place foreign policy and socialist internationalism at the heart of their efforts to further the Labour alliance. This article explores two aspects of the ‘politics of internationalism’: first, the Labour leadership's use of socialist internationalism to legitimate the Labour alliance with trade unions in the face of criticism from the ILP left wing; second, the party's portrayal of itself as a more faithful exponent of a Gladstonian moral foreign policy than the Liberal government. Labour and the ILP were crucial allies in the revisionist and pragmatic wing of the Second International, and these ties allowed the ‘Big Four’ to portray the Labour coalition as in keeping with democratic socialist strategy in Europe. At the same time, historians should explore the possibility that Labour's parliamentary and public interventions on foreign affairs aimed to undermine Liberalism on its left flank by exploiting radical concerns over the Liberal government's foreign policy, particularly its dealings with Russia, to portray Labour as the defenders of the Gladstonian tradition in foreign affairs and, hence, as the only conscionable choice for progressives in the twentieth century.

Rethinking the Beveridge Strait-jacket: The Labour Party, the TUC and the Introduction of Superannuation

Nijhuis, D. O. — 2009-05-12

This article highlights the role of the trade union movement in the failure of Labour's attempts to create adequate state pension benefits during the first half of the post-war period. It argues that union opposition to attempts to redistribute income among workers made it impossible for Labour to achieve a redistributive contributory solution for the shortcomings of the state pension. The initial choice for the ‘flawed’ Beveridge solution for social security, the failure of consecutive attempts to introduce national superannuation and the resulting inadequacy of state pension provision in the United Kingdom, can be understood only once we realize the importance of this opposition.

Between Less Eligibility and the NHS: The Changing Place of Poor Law Hospitals in England and Wales, 1929-39

Levene, A. — 2009-05-04

In 1929, the Local Government Act broke up the apparatus of the Poor Law Guardians and Unions, and transferred responsibility for the care of the poor to local councils. In theory, the period between the passing of the Act and the formation of the National Health Service witnessed a large-scale reclassification of the sick poor as patients rather than paupers. In reality, as this investigation of contemporary judgements of hospital quality and bed and staff numbers in English and Welsh county boroughs shows, the national picture was very varied at the local level. Local and sometimes regional traditions of care, finance and council priorities had a large influence on the ongoing development of a unified medical service which included the poor. In the best case scenario, hospitals were classified by patient type, and the principle of ‘less eligibility’ was discarded. Elsewhere, economic status continued to direct medical treatment, but in almost all cases, the chronic and elderly poor were more likely to remain in low-quality and unmodernized buildings than the acutely sick. The investigation highlights the disjuncture between the changed vision for the sick poor and its patchy enforcement on the ground.