This book examines class identities and politics in late twentieth-century England. Class remained important to ‘ordinary’ people’s identities and their narratives about social change in this period, but in changing ways. Using self-narratives drawn from a wide range of sources, the book shows that many people felt that once-clear class boundaries had blurred since 1945. By the end of the period, ‘working-class’ was often seen as a historical identity, related to background and heritage. The middle classes became more heterogeneous, and class snobberies ‘went underground’, as people from all backgrounds began to assert the importance of authenticity, individuality, and ordinariness. The book argues that it is more useful to understand the cultural changes of these years through the lens of the decline of deference, which transformed people’s attitudes towards class, and towards politics. The final two chapters examine the claim that Thatcher and New Labour wrote class out of politics. This simple—and highly political—narrative misses important points of distinction. Thatcher was driven by political ideology and necessity to dismiss the importance of class, while the New Labour project was good at listening to voters—particularly swing voters in marginal seats—and echoing back what they were increasingly saying about the blurring of class lines and the importance of ordinariness. But this did not add up to an abandonment of a majoritarian project, as New Labour reoriented socialism to emphasize using collective action to empower the individual.
This article will offer the first historical assessment of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement. It shows that it was not a spontaneous formation but the result of work by a network of committed, long-time activists with strong connections to the left, including the Communist Party and the Women's Liberation Movement. It will show how key questions caused divisions within the national organisation as it grew. In particular, activists were divided over whether the movement should aim solely to support the strike, or whether it should have broader aims relating to women's lives, gender and feminism. Related to this, the movement divided over relationships with Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers, and the question of which women should be allowed to be members. Finally, the article examines how these questions grew more pressing after the end of the strike, and how and why the national movement had largely disappeared three years after the strike.
This article argues that, by the 1970s, people in Britain were increasingly insistent about defining and claiming their individual rights, identities and perspectives. Using individual narratives and testimonies, we show that many were expressing desires for greater personal autonomy and self-determination. We suggest that this was an important trend across the post-war decades, and of particular importance to understanding the 1970s. This popular individualism was not the result of Thatcher; if anything, it was a cause of Thatcherism. But this individualism had multiple political and cultural valences; desires for greater individual self-determination, and anger with the 'establishment' for withholding it, did not lead inexorably to Thatcherism. There were, in fact, some sources for, and potential outlets for, popular individualism on the left-outlets that explicitly challenged class, gender and racial inequalities. With this, we suggest the possibility of a new meta-narrative of post-war Britain, cutting across the political narrative that organizes post-war British history into three periods: social democracy, 'crisis' and the triumph of 'neoliberalism'. The 1970s was a key moment in the spread of a popular, aspirational form of individualism in post-war Britain, and this development is critical to our understanding of the history of the post-war years.
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