Renewal of Radicalism

The emergence of Labour politics in southern England represented the renewal of the working-class radical tradition. During the mid-Victorian era, working-class radicals formed lively political subcultures in towns and cities across the East Midlands, East Anglia and the South West. In the 1880s and 1890s, many of them embraced the collectivist spirit of the times and built local labour parties that would go on to become local branches of the national Labour Party. But even as they established new organisations, 'labour' activists, as they came to be known, remained committed to the cultural assumptions, discursive practices and ideological beliefs of their political predecessors.

The renewal of radicalism maps the trajectory of Labour politics from its origins in a 'class-conscious' radical tradition through to its emergence as a major electoral force in the 1920s. Focusing on largely neglected areas in provincial southern England, the book offers a new narrative of continuity that challenges conventional understandings of English political history. By applying the conceptual analysis of ideologies to the world of local politics, the book identifies, for the first time, the conceptual building blocks of radical and labourist ideologies, suggesting that both deserve to be treated separately from liberalism and socialism. Matthew Kidd offers a fresh perspective on the Labour Party's contribution to the nationalisation of political culture, the survival of restrictive assumptions about gender, place, work, nationality and race in the face of political and economic change, and the process through which political identities and ideologies were forged at a local level.