Category: British History
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CFP: The British Far Left from 1956 (new volume)
CALL FOR PAPERS: THE BRITISH FAR LEFT FROM 1956 (NEW VOLUME) It has been five years since we published Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956 and the scholarship on the history of the British left has grown considerably in this time. We are also starting to see historical analysis of the…
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Will history absolve the Bristol protestors?
This was originally posted over at my Patreon here On Sunday night, a protest against the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would have put severe limitations on the right to protest in England and Wales, turned into a violent confrontation with the police. As night fell, the police used force to push…
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Book review: Graham Macklin’s Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right
This was originally published on my Patreon here. Subscribe and help me continue my research and writing endeavours. Failed Führers is the new book by scholar of British fascism, Graham Macklin, published as part of Routledge’s Fascism and the Far Right series, and is the result of years of meticulous research on the history of…
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We Call it Hiiiistory: Thinking Historically about Acid House, Rave Culture and Late Thatcherism
I was asked by Paprika!, a zine created out of the Schools of Architecture and Art at Yale, to write something about Thatcherism and the history of acid house/rave culture. It ended up being a combination of an older blog post and a review of Jeremy Deller’s recent documentary. A shorter version was published by the…
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Love Milkshakes, Hate Racism: A short history of throwing food at the far right
In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far right candidates in the Euro elections. First it was former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in Newcastle for his new Brexit Party. When Farage visited Edinburgh, the local…
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‘No Platforming’ at Bristol University in the 1980s and Now
The protests against Eric Kaufmann at the University of Bristol last week are part of a much longer history of ‘no platforming’ at the university, stretching back to the 1980s. This research is part of a book that I am writing on the history of ‘no platform’ and free speech at British universities for Routledge’s Fascism and…
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New article on Corbyn and the historical context of the 2017 Labour manifesto
Very excited to announce that British Politics has published an article by myself and Rob Manwaring on Jeremy Corbyn and the 2017 Labour Party manifesto in historical context. You can access a free version of the article here.
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Two new opinion pieces on the history of fascism and anti-fascism
A quick post to let people know that I have had two opinion pieces published this week on the history of fascism and anti-fascism in Britain and Australia. Firstly, the Times Higher Education website published a piece on the pre-history of ‘no platform’ and the protests against far right speakers on university campuses in the…
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New book: ‘Communists and Labour: The National Left-Wing Movement 1925-1929’ by Lawrence Parker (with extract)
Lawrence Parker, author of The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991, has published a new book, Communists and Labour: The National Left-Wing Movement 1925-1929. The National Left-Wing Movement (NLWM), set up by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1925–26 to pull the Labour Party rank and file towards Communist politics, was one in…
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London and the south-east regional divide in television sitcoms in Blair’s Britain
This is an extended conference paper by Lauren Pikó and myself, originally presented at the Eric Richards British and Australian History conference earlier this year. It is part of an on-going research project that we are working on looking at representations of political and socio-economic change in modern Britain through television comedies. Our previous work…