Labour's Lost Leader

Labour's Lost Leader PDF

Author: Paul Tyler

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2007-06-29

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0857714171

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The life story of Will Crooks has a Dickensian resonance. As a working class child, born into abject poverty, he experienced the rigours of Poplar Workhouse and Poor Law school. Nearly forty years later Crooks became Chairman of the Poplar Board of Guardians, the very board that had given him shelter during his challenging early years. Crooks was a member of the Coopers' Union for fifty-five years, and a leading pioneer of the trade union and Labour movement for over thirty. This significant and sometimes controversial figure has been overlooked by modern historians. Here Paul Tyler presents a pioneering political biography of a significant Labour figure at both a local and national level and an important reinterpretation of the early trade union and labour movement from the 1880s to the 1920s.

British Labour Leaders

British Labour Leaders PDF

Author: Charles Clarke

Publisher: Biteback Publishing

Published: 2015-08-08

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1849549672

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

As the party that championed trade union rights, the creation of the NHS and the establishment of a national minimum wage, Labour has played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm - from Keir Hardie to Ed Miliband, via Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Tony Blair - have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success. With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Labour leadership since the party's turn-of-the twentieth- century inception have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition - and not all its leaders have managed to keep up. This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and diplomatic landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, detailed personal biographies from some of the country's foremost political critics, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves. An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Labour Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance through the prism of those who created it.

Renegades and Rats

Renegades and Rats PDF

Author: Jacqueline Dickenson

Publisher: Academic Monographs

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0522853099

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Accusations of betrayal played a significant role in the shaping and maintenance of solidarity in socialist and other modern radical political organisations in Australia and Britain. This fascinating study of trust and betrayal focuses on case studies of 6 'rats' or renegades: H.H. Champion; William Trenwith; John Burns; Albert Victor Grayson; Adela Pankhurst Walsh; and Ada Holman. Renegades and Rats will appeal to scholars of history and sociology alike, and to anyone intersted in the subject of trust: what it is, and how it is lost.

Leaders of the Opposition

Leaders of the Opposition PDF

Author: T. Heppell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0230369006

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Timothy Heppell brings together a renowned group of contributors to consider the role of the Leader of the Opposition in British Politics. The book argues that the neglect of opposition studies needs to be addressed, especially given the increasing importance attached to the performance the Leader of the Opposition in the British political system.

Wales and Socialism

Wales and Socialism PDF

Author: Martin Wright

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2016-11-20

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1783169184

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This study examines the spread of socialism in late-Victorian and Edwardian Wales, paying particular attention to the relationship between socialism and Welsh national identity. Welsh opponents of socialism often claimed it to be a foreign import, whereas socialists often asserted that the Welsh were socialist by nature. This study – the first full-scale study of the influence of early socialism across all of Wales – demonstrates that the reality was more complex than either assertion would admit. Rather than focusing on the structural growth of socialism, the topic is discussed in terms of the spread of ideas and the development of a political culture. The study culminates in a discussion of attempts, in the period before the Great War, to create a specifically Welsh socialist tradition. In approaching the topic from this angle, this study restores a part of the lost diversity of British socialism that is of striking contemporary relevance.

Tony Benn New Edition

Tony Benn New Edition PDF

Author: David Powell

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2003-08-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780826470744

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

David Powell's fascinating biography traces Tony Benn's extraordinary fifty-year political career from the day he first entered the House of Commons in 1950. Benn has always been a controversial figure. Nonetheless many of the policies he championed, including some for which he was widely belittled, have since entered the statute books. Indeed, if history is a chronicle of ironies, there can have been little more ironic than when, following Benn's valedictory speech in the Commons in 2001, a Tory backbencher commended him to fellow MPs as Britain's ‘greatest living Parliamentarian.'>