Speak for Britain!

Oct 23, 2024 11:12 PM

Author:Martin Pugh

Speak for Britain!

Written at a critical juncture in the history of the Labour Party, Speak for Britain! is a thought-provoking and highly original interpretation of the party's evolution, from its trade union origins to its status as a national governing party. It charts Labour's rise to power by re-examining the impact of the First World War, the general strike of 1926, Labour's breakthrough at the 1945 general election, the influence of post-war affluence and consumerism on the fortunes and character of the party, and its revival after the defeats of the Thatcher era.

Controversially, Pugh argues that Labour never entirely succeeded in becoming 'the party of the working class'; many of its influential recruits - from Oswald Mosley to Hugh Gaitskell to Tony Blair - were from middle and upper-class Conservative backgrounds and rather than converting the working class to socialism, Labour adapted itself to local and regional political cultures.

Reviews

Excellent and provocative new history

—— John Campbell , Mail on Sunday

An admirable model of how political history should be written

—— Times Literary Supplement

Overall the book is... spliced with incisive arguments and interspersed with challenging verdicts on Labour's evolution... This ambitious Labour history could well become compulsory reading for future party leaders

—— John Shepherd , History Today

A startlingly revisionist book... The most provocative and clear-eyed history of the party yet... It is a tribute to Pugh's scholarship that almost everybody will learn something new from this thoughtful book

—— Dominic Sandbrook , Sunday Times

A stimulating survey

—— Kenneth O'Morgan , Literary Review

A timely book... colourful, frequently entertaining

—— Daily Telegraph

Worth it for serious students

—— Ann Treneman , The Times

Solid and lasting...thoroughly resourced and researched

—— Anthony Howard , Sunday Telegraph

A Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura

—— John de Falbe , Daily Telegraph

She has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence

—— Economist

The story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples

—— John Mullan , Times Literary Supplement

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