Labour's Grass Roots. Essays on the Activities of Local Labour Parties and Members, 1918-45 (review)

This book consists of 11 chapters examining a range of local Labour parties — in Scotland generally, Glasgow in particular, Manchester, Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands, South Wales, London, and the south-west of England — together with an introduction on 'Labour's Grass Roots' and a final chapter comparing the Labour party's branch life with that of the Social Democratic party (S.P.D.) in Germany, the traditional model of the party of 'social integration'. It reflects contemporary interest among historians of the left with the local, the regional, the cultural, the subjective and the contingent and a corresponding scepticism about big theories and typologies with their focus on national, programmatic and ideological trends (though there is varying emphasis on the role of agency in party-building between the chapters). More prosaically, it reflects the fact that comparatively little has been done on Labour at a local level. The question is whether such local studies add to our understanding of British history and the history of the Labour party and contain new insights based on issues of identity and culture. It has been done before — one thinks of Savage's study of Preston — in theoretically-informed works producing the sort of sophisticated analysis which would seem to be essential when dealing with potentially amorphous concepts such as culture. But it clearly does not derive merely from digging up some previously ignored 'facts'.

The editor's introduction specifies a number of goals for this volume which show that the ambition is much more than antiquarian. First, recognition of the role played by party members in shaping Labour's wider social and political history; second, to reveal, explore and help understand the variegated nature of the party's organization, political identity and electoral fortunes; to rescue from obscurity those men and women who helped sustain the party in the twentieth century; and to find the links between practical politics in everyday life and formal politics based on struggles in and around the state. These are useful objectives and through the subsequent chapters a picture emerges of the contribution, patchy though it inevitably was, which party made to the social and cultural environment of inter-war Britain and the creation of a working class 'public sphere'. This was of course a two-way process with strong local variations in party milieu, as Duncan Tanner's and Karen Hunt's chapters show in relation to Labour women (and Andrew Thorpe's chapter shows in relation to the south-west), depending on the interaction of local agencies and structures. There is enough evidence in the book as a whole to support Stefan Berger's comparison of the S.P.D. and the Labour party which maintains that though the German party was in many ways a model for its British counterpart, sharing many of the characteristics of its party milieux, their differences can be explained by differences in their influence over local politics, as well as differences connected to the character of the state and the timing of the appearance of mass, commercialized leisure in the two countries. Overall, however, one would have to conclude that the book does not engage consistently with the theoretical and methodological issues implied in the introduction. In the main it adds information and detail to, but does not challenge, established studies of Labour history and even those who ignored local evidence entirely in their own efforts will feel that they have little to worry about.