This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.

This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.

This book explores the uses of the past in modern British politics. It looks at the way in which political parties construct and remember their pasts through archives, histories and commemorations.

This volume explores some of the major transitions, opportunities and false dawns of modern British political history. It engages with the scholarly legacy of Professor Duncan Tanner (19582010), whose work was focused on the political process and on politics in government. Chronologically, the book's span runs from the first general election to be conducted under the terms of the Third Reform Act through to the 1997 referenda in favour of devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. This was the period in which British politicians most obviously addressed a mass electorate, seeking national approval for policies and programmes to be enacted on a UK-wide basis. The book contains essays from leading British historians including Peter Clarke, Pat Thane, David Howell, Steven Fielding, Andrew Thorpe, Jon Lawrence, Matthew Cragoe and John Davis, as well as from younger scholars such as Mari Elin Wiliam. Topics covered include the intellectual context for economic thought and for the synergy between the state and civil society, the rise of Labour in Edwardian Britain, the imagining of politics through fiction in inter-war Britain, British politics during the Second World War, devolution in Scotland and Wales, ideas of class in post-war Britain and the rise and varying fortunes of the left in London. While it will appeal primarily to scholars and students of modern British history, this volume will also interest the general reader who wishes to get to grips with some of the latest thinking about British politics.

This book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere'. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically aware public by mapping shifts in the national 'mood'. Covering addressing campaigns from the late-Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, the book explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. It argues that beneath partisan attacks on the credibility of loyal addresses lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a 'political public' but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy. They constituted a political form perfectly suited to a fundamentally unequal society in which political life continued to be centered on the monarchy.

Focusing on the changes in the 1980s in the world of government and politics and their effects on the political scene during the 1990s in both the UK and Europe, this book provides in-depth analyses of such topics as voting behaviour and the electoral system, the political parties and pressure groups, economic and social policy, the Thatcher years and their conclusion, events in Europe, privatization and the role of the state.

Dick Leonard’s Modern British Prime Ministers from Balfour to Johnson surveys the lives and careers of all the 24 Prime Ministers from Arthur Balfour to Boris Johnson in succinct, informative and entertaining chapters. Bringing to life the political achievements and personal idiosyncrasies of Britain's rulers over the 20th and 21st centuries, the author recounts the circumstances which took them to the pinnacle of British political life, probes their political and personal strengths and weaknesses, assesses their performance in office and asks what lasting influence they have had. Along the way Leonard entertains and informs, revealing little-known facts about the private lives of each of the Prime Ministers, for example, which two Premiers, one Tory, one Labour were taught by the same governess as a child? Who was thrashed at his public school for writing pornography and later donated one-fifth of his wealth to the nation? Who was awarded a fourth-class degree at Oxford and went on to father eight children? Who was described by his son as ‘probably the greatest natural Don Juan in the history of British politics'? This book can also form part of a two-volume set published by Routledge including the companion volume British Prime Ministers from Walpole to Salisbury: The 18th and 19th Centuries. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of British political history, the Executive, government, and British politics.

Enoch Powell's explosive rhetoric against black immigration and anti-discrimination law transformed the terrain of British race politics and cast a long shadow over British society. Using extensive archival research, Camilla Schofield offers a radical reappraisal of Powell's political career and insists that his historical significance is inseparable from the political generation he sought to represent. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain follows Powell's trajectory from an officer in the British Raj to the centre of British politics and, finally, to his turn to Ulster Unionism. She argues that Powell and the mass movement against 'New Commonwealth' immigration that he inspired shed light on Britain's war generation, popular understandings of the welfare state and the significance of memories of war and empire in the making of postcolonial Britain. Through Powell, Schofield illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the politics of imperial decline in Britain.