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Labour Cabinet remained to become leader of a decimated party.14 Emasculated, Labour made little impact on such critical issues as mass unemployment and the infamous means test. By the time of the 1935 election, although Joad actively campaigned for Labour, most FPSI members remained sceptical. The FPSI was spawned, not as a rival or mouthpiece for the Labour Party, but in a manner more typical of extra-parliamentary left-wing groupings full of idealistic individuals bent on applying rational and scientific measures to solve a range of social and economic problems at
seemed hollow in such circumstances and ‘depression’ became a familiar term as unemployment figures reached unprecedented heights in the winter of 1920, when two million men were out of work. After that winter the number of unemployed men rarely fell below one million, and reached a MUP_Grandy_Heroes.indd 1 20/02/2014 11:23 2 Heroes and happy endings staggering three million men in 1932.1 Alongside this economic instability was international political uncertainty as the conditions of the Versailles Treaty crumbled, fascism reared its head in Europe, and the
primary reasons for selecting Sheppey for his study. After its sociological distinctiveness, and its reputation for informal economy, he notes: The third main factor that drew me to the Island was its pattern of unemployment. As an Admiralty dockyard from the late seventeenth century and also a military garrison, Sheerness had almost three hundred years of industrial history which might have produced a mature working-class culture. The dockyard had closed twenty years before the fieldwork began, but it was in the front of the minds of all those who had been
recognition and equal pay considered in the previous two chapters, towards working-class women’s fight against factory closures and unemployment. Whilst these women were fighting for different ends, their narratives of work and industrial struggle continue to offer insights into the themes discussed in the previous chapters: working-class women’s experiences of manual labour; the relationship between female workers and their trade union; the interaction between working-class women and the WLM; and working-class women’s political identity. Context Fakenham is a small market
1 London crime scenes in the 1930s Introduction Suspicious death cases in the 1930s portray a London whose brilliant public and commercial life concealed a darker and shabbier poverty. Although stranger murders in London’s cosmopolitan Soho involving foreign restaurant workers and prostitutes captured newspaper headlines in the 1930s, this chapter also reveals a much more intimate picture of violence in which most victims and perpetrators knew each other, and in which women and children were the main victims. Parents driven to desperation by unemployment and
banlieue, family conflict, juvenile delinquency/violence, unemployment and more recently, discrimination. Much of the existing literature on young people of ‘immigrant origin’ has taken the notion of integration as its framework, thus asking how and to what extent young people of immigrant descent are being integrated into mainstream society. One of the limitations in all these debates is the lack of explicit linking between the different perspectives. For example, the more theoretical debates tend to remain normative in character, discussing the merits and disadvantages
unemployment and social inequality, and end the current economic crisis – is their own version of Keynesianism. This alternative, however, merely constitutes a frame of reference for negotiation. This is reflected in the absence of active opposition to austerity measures in Ireland. This situation has turned Irish trade unions, in their present form, into an obstacle for the advancement of the political economy of wage labour. Trade unions, particularly SIPTU, gave in to the neoliberal version of capitalism in order to achieve the first Social Partnership in 1987. The bottom
3 Thatcherism and South Yorkshire Looks and Smiles, Unfinished Business, Fun City, Threads In this chapter, we trace the aesthetic and political effects of the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government on Hines’s writing. His screenplay for the 1981 film Looks and Smiles takes an art-cinematic form to explore the pressures of the era’s unemployment on young people, in his fourth and final collaboration with Ken Loach. By contrast, Hines’s novel Unfinished Business (1983) examines the possibilities of social freedom, in this narrative about the
protection ‘became firmly established as the basis of Australian living standards’ for the twentieth century. 12 Labour’s aims to improve the living and working conditions of the wider working class and small producers and to advance the causes of social justice and the full attainment of political democracy were reflected in numerous ways. In Britain between 1906 and 1910 the Labour Party ‘campaigned strongly for public programmes to remedy unemployment, and to establish the “right to work”; it sought the amendment
years at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, claimed that financial journalists enjoyed a special relationship with their readers. Their particular expertise and the integrity with which they went about their work meant that they were trusted. ‘This faith runs across the board’, he noted, ‘from the widow in Bournemouth to the institutional fund manager in the City.’10 Using letters sent to Robert Head in 1981, it will be argued that this also applied to council house tenants, old age pensioners and redundant workers learning to live with unemployment.11 In the end it was