Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party. By Martin Pugh.

摘要

Martin Pugh's book examines the evolution of the Labour Party with careful detail to its early campaigns and intellectual origins. In exploring Labour's foundations, he argues that the party was never completely committed to a leftist vision of socialism and Tony Blair's New Labour followed the party's history of appealing to populist Tory values while avoiding an extremist programme. Pugh suggests the key to Labour's early appeal was its flexibility, which allowed it to reach people with a variety of local and regional issues. He explores this by examining the economic downturn in the 1920s and the vacuum left by the Liberal Party following the Great War that allowed the Labour Party to become a national political organization. Speak for Britain is a valuable examination of the Labour Movement that provokes a rethinking of how the Labour Party originated and how it became one of the two dominant British political parties of the twentieth century. The book traces the history of the Labour Movement, not Labour governments, devoting roughly three-fourths of the book to the origins of Labour through Clement Attlee's government. With his focus on early events and ideological evolution, Pugh argues that from Labour's origins its leaders ‘combined left and right-wing values in a consistent and coherent fashion’ allowing the party to harness a range of …