{"title":"Lewis Minkin and the party–unions link","authors":"Eric H. Shaw","doi":"10.7765/9781526137456.00017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137456.00017","url":null,"abstract":"Alliance (1991: xii), the Labour Party–trade unions link ‘has shaped the structure and, in various ways, the character of the British Left’. His core proposition can be encapsulated simply: trade union ‘restraint has been the central characteristic’ of the link (1991: 26). This constitutes a frontal challenge to received wisdom – endlessly repeated, recycled and amplified by Britain’s media – that, until the ‘modernisation’ of the party, initiated by Neil Kinnock and accelerated by Tony Blair, the unions ran the party. So ingrained is this wisdom in British political culture that no discussion of party–unions relations in the media can endure for long without some reference to the days when ‘the union barons controlled the party’. This view, Minkin holds, is a gross over-simplification and, to a degree, downright misleading. The relationship is infinitely more subtle and complex, and far more balanced than the conventional view allows. The task Minkin sets himself in The Contentious Alliance is twofold: on the one hand to explain why and how he reached that conclusion; and, on the other – the core of the book – to lay bare the inner dynamics of the party–unions connection. What is most distinctive and enduring about Minkin’s work? In what ways has it most contributed to our understanding of the labour movement? Does it still offer insights for scholars of Labour politics? In the first section of this paper, I examine how Minkin contests the premisses underpinning the orthodox thesis of trade union ‘baronial power’; in the second, I analyse the ‘sociological’ frame of reference he devised as an analytical tool to uncover the roots and essential properties of the party–unions connection; in the third section, I address the question of the relevance of Minkin today.","PeriodicalId":197390,"journal":{"name":"Interpreting the Labour Party","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123072563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ralph Miliband and the Labour Party","authors":"M. Newman","doi":"10.7765/9781526137456.00010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137456.00010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":197390,"journal":{"name":"Interpreting the Labour Party","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133769155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.7765/9781526137456.00005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137456.00005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":197390,"journal":{"name":"Interpreting the Labour Party","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127070602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Class and politics in the work of Henry Pelling","authors":"Alastair J. Reid","doi":"10.7765/9781526137456.00013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137456.00013","url":null,"abstract":"established labour history on a professional footing, Henry Pelling is generally regarded as worthy but rather dull. For he did not share the more colourful far-left political affiliations of figures such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson. Indeed, when these Marxists were at the height of their influence in the late 1960s and 1970s, Pelling’s careful history of the British Communist Party was frequently dismissed as Cold War propaganda. At that time his contributions to the history of the Labour Party were commonly pigeon-holed as scholarly but narrow, for they were seen as mere political history with no obvious wider implications for the analysis of society as a whole. As Jay Winter (1983: x) put it, albeit respectfully, in the Introduction to a collection of essays in Pelling’s honour:","PeriodicalId":197390,"journal":{"name":"Interpreting the Labour Party","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130863701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}