ABSTRACT The restructuring of Britain’s civil service is understood mainly as a Thatcher- and Blair-era event rooted in neoliberal economic policies. Yet its roots reach back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. During that time, senior civil servants turned to American management strategy to advance the government’s efforts to scale back the size of the service. This article explores these efforts via the activities of the Treasury’s Management Services Division and its Head, John N. Archer. In 1969, Archer made a month-long visit to the United States to study American management techniques. Over the next few years, he and his colleagues attempted to implement one of these techniques in particular—Office Work Measurement—throughout the service. Derived from scientific management, OWM would, they believed, help cut the number of positions in the service. In tracing these efforts, the discussion sheds light on an under-analysed episode in Britain’s civil service reform history. In turn, it argues that the OWM quest of the early 1970s played a heretofore under-emphasised role in the government’s embrace of ‘managerialism’ and the implementation of civil service reforms.

ABSTRACT Most ethnic Chinese living and working in Britain in the late 1960s were from Hong Kong’s New Territories. Many of these British migrants blamed the Hong Kong government for importing cheap foodstuffs and driving farmers off the land to build new infrastructural projects. In 1967, Hong Kong experienced a wave of social and political unrest commonly referred to as the 1967 Leftist Riots. The unrest spread to parts of Britain’s Chinatown, where a leftist movement emerged in sympathy with the anti-colonial rioters. In response, the Heung Yee Kuk, a legal advisory organisation that represented established interests in the New Territories, proposed to send a ‘goodwill tour’ to Britain’s Chinatowns to demonstrate that the Hong Kong government was committed to their welfare. The unlikely alliance proved politically expedient as both had good reason to foster the political loyalty of Britain’s migrant Chinese. In particular, both parties understood the economic necessity of quieting the unrest to ensure the continued flow of remittance back to the colony. The detailed report of migrant Chinese grievances with the British and Hong Kong governments produced by the Heung Yee Kuk delegates led to welfare reforms for the Chinese communities of Hong Kong and Britain.

ABSTRACT This article proposes an innovative analytical framework for understanding memory work in oral history interviews with migrants who experienced the Troubles in Northern Ireland before migrating to Britain. Integrating theories of diasporic subjectivity from migration studies with conceptual developments in oral history and current research on memory, temporality and the history of emotions, it focuses on transnational dynamics in ‘travelling memories’ of the Troubles brought to Britain by first-generation migrants; the long temporal ‘afterlife of feelings’ attached to conflict memories; and the process of ‘associative diffraction’ whereby chronologically sequential memories are interrupted, fragmented and recombined in achronological sequences linking diverse temporal moments and spatial locations. The utility of these concepts is explored in an intensive analysis of memory dynamics and subjectivity in a single interview, with Siobhán O’Neill, who grew up Catholic, working-class and queer in nationalist/republican West Belfast at the epicentre of conflict violence, and moved to London in 1986. The article argues that the specificities of individual migration stories such as Siobhán’s resist conventional generalisation, and offers a new theoretical and methodological framework for the systematic investigation of quotidian experiences, memories and silences that are unexplored in the established historiographies of the Troubles and the Irish diaspora in Britain.

ABSTRACT This article assesses the efforts that were made within the British Labour Party to isolate and exclude the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyite entryist group, during the period 1979 to 1983. It argues that the battle over whether or not Militant should be expelled from Labour was, primarily, a battle of metaphor and semantics. More specifically, it suggests that these years witnessed the successful construction of Militant as Labour’s unwanted and malignant ‘other’. Five central discursive motifs (medical, subhumanal, emotional, ideological, and historical) for ‘othering’ are identified. These motifs were operationalised in a systematic and sustained manner by individuals and groups who were hostile to Militant, such as the Labour Solidarity Campaign. Over time, Labour leader Michael Foot, who had, initially, been reluctant to take action against Militant, also adopted the language of this active and purposive rhetorical strategy. In response, Militant’s main counter-discursive strategy, the ‘witch hunt’ narrative, failed to shape party opinion decisively and prevent the initiation of exclusionary processes. By 1983, the pattern of interrelated discursive motifs for ‘othering’ that would be applied to Militant throughout the decade had been established: a hegemonic narrative, concerning the tendency’s imminent ‘threat’ to Labour, had permeated all levels of the party.

ABSTRACT The position of the UK deputy prime minister is clouded in mystery. The title suggests a minster of some seniority, one likely to step in for an absent premier to chair a cabinet meeting or perform at prime minister’s questions (PMQs) – but that is merely supposition. No official statement exists to explain the functions the position entails or indeed to confirm that it endures as anything more substantial than a courtesy title. Using archive material and other resources, this article will try to expose this constitutional phantom. To achieve this task, there will be close examination of the first individual to be publicly announced – in February 1942 – as the UK’s deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee. Though there will be discussion of some of the tasks Attlee performed in this capacity (tasks which have influenced the development of deputy prime ministership as an institution), the primary purpose of this article is to help lift some of the constitutional smog. In particular, it will illuminate why – in contrast to analogous positions such as the US vice president – the British deputy prime minister is still not regarded as any more likely to succeed a prime minister than any other senior minister.

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of the post-war new towns in Scotland in providing people with the opportunity to own their own homes. Most importantly, it traces the development of this policy prior to the ‘Right to Buy’ of the early 1980s when tenants were offered substantial discounts by local authorities, housing associations and crucially, new town development corporations. The article challenges the dominance of rented tenure in existing accounts of Scottish housing, showing that there was demand for ownership in Scotland in the decades before the introduction of incentives. This article takes a ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approach to understand a period of expanding opportunity for some, though not all, of those relocating and starting new lives in East Kilbride, Glenrothes and Cumbernauld. Archive evidence exploring policy and the response of the new town development corporations is complemented by analysis of life narratives provided by those that moved to the new towns and their children. In doing so, this article contributes to a growing scholarship that challenges stereotypical perceptions of class and identity in the immediate post-war decades whilst also revealing new insights into the post-war state as an enabler of opportunity for some.

ABSTRACT This article contributes to understanding how civil nuclear power shaped post-war British history through studying opposition to nuclear energy in Scotland. Over the second half of the twentieth century, pessimistic assessments challenged the optimism that had developed during the 1950s. Under devolution, Scottish administrations have used planning policies to block future nuclear generating plants, institutionalising a marked distinction with the rest of the UK. The origins of these differences are traced to anti-nuclear protests and the growth of a social movement coalition that linked anti-nuclear activism with growing public sentiment and electoral politics, particularly through the Scottish National Party (SNP). Reflections from oral history interviews are used to examine diverse local protest contexts supplemented by archives from the anti-nuclear movement and the SNP. During the 1970s, protests against Torness power station in East Lothian and the drilling of test bores for waste disposal in South Ayrshire were given a national orientation by SNP politicians. Over the course of the 1980s, the anti-nuclear coalition broadened through growing opposition to Torness and in response to the Chernobyl disaster. These changes encouraged a lasting symbiosis between pro-devolution and anti-nuclear sentiments which were subsequently embodied in policies pursued by devolved administrations during the 2000s.

ABSTRACT The 1920s marked the first decade in which the Labour Party and the British intelligence community had to work closely together. Their relations during this period, which were often strained, have come to be defined by the Zinoviev letter affair. Allegations that intelligence officials leaked the Zinoviev letter to bring down the Labour government in 1924 have persisted for the last century. Using documents that have been largely unexplored, this article argues that the Zinoviev affair was not an isolated incident. It uses two specific case studies to show that a small number of intelligence officials also leaked sensitive information, in the years before and after 1924, in an attempt to undermine and discredit prominent Labour Party figures. By analysing events in the years before and after the Zinoviev affair, the article illustrates how relations between the British state and the Labour Party fluctuated providing a fresh understanding of Labour Party-intelligence relations during the interwar years.

ABSTRACT The establishment of an anti-socialist hegemony has been widely accepted as the pivot of the Conservative Party’s electoral dominance in the interwar period. Anti-communism as a component of anti-socialist discourse, though commonly alluded to, has not received systematic attention, and is known above all for its appearance during the 1924 election campaign by way of the Zinoviev letter. This article offers the first comprehensive account of British political anti-communism in the early 1920s and reinterprets its significance and reach by demonstrating the vast extent to which it saturated Conservative propaganda between 1919 and 1924, as well as the range of social groups it sought to appeal to by these methods. It explores the origins and development of political anti-communism from the ‘first red scare’ in 1919-21 to the infamous 1924 campaign, punctuated by a series of ‘little red scares’ by which the fear of communism was perpetuated among key demographics. The 1924 election, rather than being seen chiefly as a triumph of ‘progressive’ Baldwinite Conservatism, must be understood in this context of a developed and pervasive anti-communist discourse that could be effectively deployed to engender a red scare under certain conditions, which the first Labour government was not the first to provide.