Labour Party Research Articles

People's Socialists and Labor Group in 1917: Unity or Association? Bulletin of Science and Practice

The relevance of the problems of this study is due to the enduring importance of finding opportunities for compromise and unity of the progressive political forces of the country in critical, crisis periods of its history. The article examines aspects of cooperation, commonality and differences in the ideological views of two prominent political organizations of 1906-1917: the People's Socialist Party (PNS) and the Trudoviks, which united during the Great Russian Revolution in the summer of 1917 to form the People's Socialist Party of Labor. It is shown that, despite very productive cooperation in preparing a number of key programmatic issues (for example, agrarian), submitted for discussion in the State Duma and supposed to be consistently resolved in the course of the struggle for social justice, absolute political agreement between the People's Socialists and the Trudoviks did not occur. The factors that prevented this are analyzed: first, the desire of the Trudoviks to maintain the image of a non-partisan, non-ideological peasant faction, then the extremely difficult conditions for open opposition activity and the actual departure of the PNS from the political arena (1908-1916); Finally, the unwillingness of the Trudoviks to interact with the liberal parties during the revolutionary transformations of 1917 and disagreements with the Popular Socialists during the development of a project to resolve the national question. It is concluded that at the time of the creation of the united TNSP, the opportunity for organic unity was missed, and the party became more of an association than a team of genuine like-minded people.

A gestalt shift? Reflections from researchers turned elected representatives on the real-world use of evidence in policy making

This practice piece will present a comparative reflection of how the use of evidence in policy looks when viewed from the outside, as a researcher, with how evidence use is experienced when working as a policy maker. The three authors are unusual in sharing an experience of studying evidence use in policy before becoming elected politicians who are involved in policy making and who have therefore gained a very different, more direct experience of how evidence is used in policy-making settings. Synhaeve has studied evidence use in secure youth care and is an elected councillor and was elected national member of parliament for the Democrats 66 Party in the Netherlands, McMahon has studied evidence use in public health and is an elected councillor for the Labour Party in England, while Heap has studied evidence use in social security policy and is an elected councillor for the Green Party in Scotland. The practice piece will consider to what extent their perspectives on evidence use in policy have shifted as they have moved from researcher to political representative and policy maker, and will consider to what extent these experiences have been shaped by their substantive policy interests and the political systems in which each is operating. It will conclude by summarising the collective insights that have emerged for the three authors as they have shifted to viewing evidence use from the perspective of an insider, who is using evidence in making policy, rather than an outsider, producing evidence with a view to influencing policy.

Nakba and the US-Israel Imperial Regime

Abstract The US-Israeli genocide is best understood as the end game of empire, the culmination of failed Anglo-American and Zionist policies in the Middle East and, indeed, virtually the entire non-Western world. It is the outcome of a US-sponsored apartheid system in Israel, largely carried out by the IDF and other militarist forces in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel itself and funded by American financial assistance and weapons transfers to the Israeli army. The threats of multipolarity to US/NATO hegemony, Britain being the major junior partner, pushed the Trump and Biden administrations, along with the British Tories and post-Corbyn Labour Party, to support de facto the “final solution” in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. This article puts the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, the Hamas-led attack on October 7 being the main pretext, in historical perspective. It argues that it is a logical sequence of the pre-war Zionist idea of an exclusive Jewish state and US and UK post-war power politics in the Middle East and in two imperial states’ respective domestic electoral politics.

A decolonial approach to Brazilian environmental policy since 1972

The aim of this article is to discuss the neoliberal project as a colonial determinant of the environmental policy in Brazil since 1972. The 1972 Stockholm Conference is used as a milestone for analysis. The results show that, since the military regime in the 1970s and through successive elected governments, whether right- or left-wing, federal policies have consistently aimed to boost the country’s economic growth. Even the few socio-environmental advances identified during the first administrations of the Labour Party (2003–2010) resulted from processes focused on the ‘deterritorialisation’ of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. The ultra-liberal project adopted by the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022) accelerated these processes and promoted an aggressive denialist, anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous agenda. Given the current political scenario (Lula administration 2023–2026), this study makes the following main contributions: it offers a new orientation for the environmental and Indigenous agendas developed by the progressive sector in Brazil and advocates for a science orientated towards contributing to a new environmental and Indigenous agenda in the country.

Elites and Education: Caroline Benn and the Policy Intellectuals of the British Labour Party, Circa 1950–1990

ABSTRACT This paper revisits and reassesses the intellectual and practical contribution of Caroline Benn (née DeCamp, 1926–2000) to politics, policymaking and practice at a crucial turning point in English education, which I call the ‘long comprehensive moment’ between 1950 and 1990. It articulates a strong sense that her involvement in significant public events warrants close investigation before it disappears from professional memory. The American wife of Tony Benn, one of the most influential post-war socialists in Europe, Caroline Benn stands out for her commitment to an educational system in which all young people could develop their talents to the full. Based on her newly available archive, containing thousands of documents, historically informed network ethnography is used to map her on-going effort and provide a detailed descriptive account of the ideological power and pervasiveness of the idea that a school system designed for an elite is not about social engineering, whereas comprehensive education which values all children, all parents, all neighbourhoods, equally is.

Mobilising for organising?: Momentum’s distributed centralization and Labour Left strategy under Corbyn (2015–2020)

The Corbyn regency of the Labour Party has been marked by an apparent paradox. On one hand, the Left proved able to activate impressive processes of mobilisation during general elections and in confrontations with intraparty adversaries; on the other, it left little if any organisational legacy, rapidly retreating to a position of low relevance shortly after Corbyn’s demise. This article aims to explain such a paradox by referring to Momentum, the collective arm of the intraparty Left, and in particular to the consequences of the organisational logic it adopted, namely distributed centralization. After proposing a novel conceptualisation of distributed centralization, the article analyses, making use of 24 interviews with Momentum activists, how Momentum innovated repertories of mobilisation while proving organisationally fragile. After relating Momentum’s organisational vicissitudes with the distributed centralization logic, this study interprets the choice for this organisational model within the Left’s intraparty strategy.

A Little History of the Australian Labor Party. By NickDyrenfurth and FrankBongiorno. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2024. pp. 304. $27.99 (pb)

A Little History of the Australian Labor Party. By NickDyrenfurth and FrankBongiorno. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2024. pp. 304. $27.99 (pb)

Labour Women MPs and Housewifery in the House of Commons, 1945–1951

Abstract This article analyses how Labour women MPs championed the needs of ‘the housewife’ in parliament in order to improve the lives of women, especially working-class women, during the Attlee administration. Relying on personal experience to make their case, these women spoke as housewives, not just for housewives, using gendered experiences for political ends. This article examines how they applied the politics of housewifery to two specific contemporary economic challenges: the cost of living and the impact of taxation. In doing so, and in contrast to the established literature, it shows how far Labour women were prepared to challenge party and government policy on behalf of women. It thus contributes to historiographical debates about the Labour party’s relationship to consumerism and affluence as well as gender and austerity. Building on Brian Harrison’s influential study of interwar women MPs, it also responds to a recent call made by Miles Taylor in this journal for more attention to women as legislators in the post-war period. Methodologically, it emphasizes the benefits of qualitative analysis of ‘big data’ sources.

Book Review: Keeping the red flag flying: The labour party in opposition since 1922

Book Review: Keeping the red flag flying: The labour party in opposition since 1922

UK Labour Party Leaders' Attitudes to Conventional Threats to National Security, 2023-2024

Introduction. The article focuses on the securitisation of power threats in the public speeches of the UK Labour Party leaders (Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Defence Minister John Healey and Foreign Secretary David Lammy) during the 2023-2024 election campaign. An attempt has been made to highlight the commonalities and peculiarities in the approach of the current and previous British governments to countering the main threats to national security. Materials and methods. The paper combines qualitative and quantitative approaches: a critical content analysis of sources and discourse analysis in an electoral context (using data from sociological surveys) are conducted, while the frequency of word usage in the public speeches of the Minister of Foreign Affairs is analysed using the tools of quantitative analysis of big data (R programming language). The methodological basis of the work is the theory of securitisation proposed by the Copenhagen School of the theory of international relations.Research results. It is concluded that the main change in London's foreign policy after Labour's victory in the 2024 parliamentary elections will be the prioritisation of security cooperation with European states. Labour Party leaders do not question the need for ‘dual containment’ of Russia and China, but they give the ‘China threat’ secondary importance: there are noticeable differences within the party on this issue. On the other hand, Labour's position on the ‘special relationship’ with the United States is characterised by a steady continuity with the Conservative government's approach. The need to deepen cooperation in Euro-Atlantic security structures (primarily NATO) and continental formats (EI2, JEF) is stated.Discussion and conclusion. On the basis of qualitative examination of policy documents and statements of the Labour Party leaders, as well as quantitative analysis of big data, conclusions are drawn about the key elements of potential continuity and variability in the foreign policy of London before and after the parliamentary elections on July 4, 2024. The results of the work can be useful in forecasting changes in the foreign policy of Great Britain after the victory of Labour in the parliamentary elections of 2024. The theoretical importance of the work lies in the fact that the article proposes a new methodology for quantitative analysis of the foreign policy of the UK.

Tackling transparency in UK politics: application of large language models to clustering and classification of UK parliamentary divisions

For a healthier democracy in the UK, novel methods of visualising political data are key to improving transparency, and encouraging engagement. The paper proposes a visualisation tool, using Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT3.5 and GPT4, to conduct Natural Language Processing (NLP) in a novel methodology. We investigate partisan voting profiles, specifically of the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties along 11 predetermined dimensions, ranging from Immigration and Borders, over Welfare and Social Housing, to European Union and Foreign Affairs. Higher order dimensions reveals shifts in party preference over time, while clear trends of more extreme voting behaviour can be seen across parties between 2016 and 2023. The novel visualisation methodology reveals that voting behaviour has become more polarised along party lines, with Labour becoming more left-wing and Conservatives becoming more right-wing regarding most political topics. Liberal Democrats voting behaviour has typically been those of an opposition party, albeit becoming somewhat more extreme.

The India League and the Condition of India: Agnotological Imperialism, Colonial State Violence and the Making of Anticolonial Knowledge 1930–4

Abstract This article explores the 1932 visit to India of a delegation of Labour party figures associated with the India League, a prominent anticolonial organisation based in London, charged with investigating the colonial state violence unleashed by ‘Ordinance Rule’. It also examines efforts taken by the Government of India, India Office and Indian Political Intelligence to suppress their findings, through which it explores a dialectic between anticolonial knowledge-making and agnotological imperialism, which often took the form of the latter ‘exceptioning’ examples produced by the former of excessive colonial state violence. It offers the conclusion that the contradictions between liberal imperialism and the rule of colonial difference and repression in the age of mass nationalism in India and mass democracy in Britain meant that liberal imperialism in India increasingly flowed, paradoxically, from illiberalism in Britain.

Uma fusão discursivo-espetacular entre política, mídia e religião na campanha presidencial de 2018 no Brasil

The main objective of this article is to correlate the theoretical assumptions of enunciative Discourse Analysis and Guy Debord’s (1997) work on the social spectacle, through the proposal of a discursive-spectacular fusion between the political, the media and the religious, in the 2018 election campaign led by the party coalition “Brazil above everything, God above everyone”, composed of the Social Liberal Party (PSL) and the Brazilian Renewal Labor Party (PRTB). The aim is to demonstrate, from Debord's perspective (1997), the profound relationship between capitalism and social spectacle, understood as relations mediated by images. It also seeks to associate social spectacle and the scene of enunciation, a notion that recovers the process of representation of the very situation of speaking, through the discursive constitution of the enunciative instances: the enunciator/co-enunciator pair and the coordinates of time and space of enunciation. In addition, a proposal for analyzing the corpus is presented, which consists of highlighting, in the verbal-visual materiality, the traits that show the discursive functioning that is presented as the hypothesis of this research: a discursive-spectacular fusion between discourses that circulate in the political, media and religious fields, specifically.

Planning and party manifestos in recent UK general elections

In a democracy, a commonly held idea is that political parties present their programmes for government before elections so that people know what they are voting for. It is then often held that governments should follow what they have said, when in government. These programmes may take several forms, but the most common one is the party manifesto. Here the aim is to consider how planning elements have figured in manifestos. Manifestos are surveyed from the four UK general elections 2010–2019, concentrating on those of the Conservative and Labour parties. How far did planning figure in manifestos? Were there big differences between parties and elections? To what extent did a winning party follow its manifesto? Manifestos tread a complicated line between clear ideological statements and more immediately tuned electoral political considerations. Some implications are drawn out for how planning actors may relate to manifestos in the future.

The Economic Competence of the Labour Party in Historical Perspective

The Economic Competence of the Labour Party in Historical Perspective

State, capital and nation in Green New Deal Politics: lessons from the British Labour Party’s 2019 programme

ABSTRACT The Green New Deal (GND) has emerged as a crucial progressive agenda for sustainability transition, but there have been few attempts to develop it into a concrete programme for government. This paper considers one such attempt – the GND proposals put forth by the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – and how it tackled three key challenges faced by the broader GND agenda: its reliance on the state, its relationship with capital, and its Western centrism. The paper argues that these challenges gave rise to tensions within Labour’s proposals: treating the state both as an instrument and as an object of change, ambivalence towards capitalism as an economic system and struggling to reconcile the competing forces of nationalism and internationalism. By examining these challenges and Labour's efforts to overcome them, this study provides valuable insights into the messy politics of enacting Green New Deal visions.

Inside the ‘secret garden’: Candidate selection at the 2019 UK general election

Candidate selections are seen as the ‘secret garden’ of UK politics. Hundreds of parliamentary constituencies rarely change hands, meaning that the ‘real election’ is the incumbent party’s selection process. Yet scholarship into candidate selection in the United Kingdom remains limited. In this article, we build a novel dataset of known shortlisted candidates in winnable seats to offer the first cross-party analysis of who gets shortlisted, and what factors influence success among shortlisted candidates. We find that shortlisted female and ethnic minority candidates are still less likely to be selected as parliamentary candidates, while living locally is by far the most significant factor affecting selection success. However, the nature of the 2019 snap election allowed parties to use emergency powers to advantage party insiders in late selections. We further find that, contrary to media focus, party faction was not a significant factor in Conservative or Labour Party selections.

Britain in the Pacific: Staying the Course?

The British Labour Party, after 14 years out of office, is grappling with a dynamic global strategic environment that has been transformed during that period. It has committed to a ‘NATO-first’ defence and security policy and presided over the United Kingdom’s military pullback ‘east of Suez’ in the 1960s and 1970s, raising questions about the fate of the ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ unveiled by the Conservative government three years ago. With its Strategic Defence Review and its first full budget, the new government has the opportunity to take ownership of the tilt. There may be synergies among capabilities that can add value in both the Euro-Atlantic and Asia-Pacific regions, in particular with respect to aircraft carriers, submarines and new fighter aircraft. The UK’s paramount challenge is to achieve the right balance between integrated and sovereign capabilities so as to add value without overstretching limited resources or descending to mere tokenism.

Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973–1997, by Colm Murphy

Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973–1997, by Colm Murphy

Enduring inequalities in British politics: Muslim women in the Labour Party

Abstract This article combines an understanding of British politics grounded in the Asymmetric Power Model with intersectionality to comprehend Muslim women’s experiences in the Labour Party. This paper shows that an intersectional framework and an analysis of political parties’ relationships with their members are essential to understanding the enduring inequalities of the British political system. Muslim women are under-represented in our political system; they face multiple forms of discrimination (racism and sexism). Some Muslim men have and use their relative power over Muslim women through their use of biraderi-politicking, and Muslim women do not trust the Labour Party to support them.