Locality, Politics, and Culture; Poplar in the 1920s

Abstract

The relationship between a local polity and its civil society is explored, and it is argued that local polities cannot be understood in isolation from the specific institutions, practices, and culture of the locality. This is no longer a particularly novel claim to make, of course; yet it is a claim interpreted in a peculiarly narrow way by current theorists of the locality and the local state, who see the influence of civil society on local politics wholly in terms of class. The author begins this paper by offering an alternative theoretical framework which unites locality, politics, and culture, In the second section the political beliefs and policies of the Labour Party in the cast London borough of Poplar in the 1920s are examined and it is shown how local cultural values and ways of understanding the world shaped those political commitments to a very large degree. In the third part the social power relations are explored which developed between the Labour-controlled local state and the institutions of its civil society and which sprang from those local Labour Party values, These power structures changed during the 1920s, shifting from a participatory form of mass politics in the early 1920s to a much more exclusionary and elitist mode later in the decade. It will be argued that both types of power relations can be linked very closely to Poplar's local culture, and in the final section some conclusions will be drawn from this about the politics of local culture.