‘Waving the Banners of a Bygone Age’, Nostalgia and Labour's Clause IV Controversy, 1959–60

‘The ideological tree is always green’: Norberto Bobbio and the future of ideology studies

“…And why do particular policies, such as nationalisation, come to be associated with the 'pastness' of particular historical moments? 10 To answer these kinds of questions, we need to think more deeply about the relationship between the left-right distinction and the other distinctions that we might identify within political systems. At some junctures, Bobbio threatened to conflate the extreme-moderate dyad into the left-right one.…”

From Out of Apathy to the post-political: The spatial politics of austerity, the geographies of politicisation and the trajectories of the Scottish left(s)

“…‘The Supply of Demand’, Stuart Hall’s contribution to the pivotal New Left collection Out of Apathy published in 1960, closes with a trenchant critique of Hugh Gaitskell’s speech to the Blackpool Conference of the Labour Party in 1959. Gaitskell, the ‘political figurehead of Labour’s revisionsists’, had used the speech to seek to abolish the Party’s totemic Clause IV – promising the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ – in response to the Party’s recent electoral defeat (Jobson, 2013: 124). Hall’s essay does more, however, than simply defend clause IV, rather, it contests the whole logic of Gaitskell’s construction of politics.…”

Political Performance and Leadership Persona: The UK Labour Party Conference of 2012

“… 1 There is also an emerging literature on Labour Party discourse, ritual and symbolism, some of which was presented at the 2013 Political Studies Association Conference. See Jobson (2013a) on Blue Labour and nostalgia; Robinson (2013) on the rewriting of Clause IV and the value of history as a rhetorical and political tool; and Wickham-Jones (2013a) on history, memory and the social democratic project. See also Jobson and Wickham-Jones (2010) on nostalgia and the 2010 Labour Party leadership contest; Atkins (2011) on New Labour policy; Jobson (2013b) on nostalgia and Labour's Clause IV controversy, 1959–60; and Pettitt (2012) on party leaders’ speeches.…”