Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party, by Laura Beers

Abstract

This is an excellent study of the Labour Party's evolving attitudes to using the media and modern methods of political communication between the party's (effective) foundation in 1900 and the securing of its first, and sweeping, outright General Election victory in 1945. Taking a chronological approach, and using a wide range of contemporary Labour Party and media, especially newspaper, sources, Laura Beers charts the peaks and troughs in leading Labour and associated trade-union figures’ levels of enthusiasm for engaging with the newly emerging, increasingly influential, often commercial, and frequently fairly ideologically hostile media of newspapers, radio, posters and cinema as a means of broadening the young party's electoral support. Peaks emerge in the willingness of Ramsay MacDonald to use colourful visual images in party posters in the pre-First World War years, the railway workers’ effective use of cinema footage in gaining public sympathy for their 1919 strike, and above all the party's more systematically enthusiastic pursuit of media coverage from the early 1930s onwards, which culminated, Beers suggests, with the important and historiographically neglected role which the media played in its victory in 1945. The major trough appears in the mid-1920s, as the party recoiled from its poundings by The Daily Mail and other newspapers, and from the newly-formed BBC's pro-government line during the 1926 General Strike.