The Labour Party since 1979: Crisis and Transformation challenges the claim that Labour's only real hope for the future lies in shedding its ideological baggage. It rejects the notion taht the 'shadow budget' was the prime cause of its 1992 defeat and argues that the strategyof seeking an image of 'responsibility' and 'respectability' - which under the new leadership has become a paramount concern - does not offer the best route forward for the party. The effect of this strategy - of abandoning traditional tenets, and adopting a policy profile more to the tastes of its critics in business and the media - will be to deprive Labour of its sheet-anchor; and even if successful electorally, the price will be that the hopes and aspirations of its supporters will be highly unlikely to be fulfilled.

This book provides a novel account of the Labour Party’s years in opposition and power since 1979, examining how New Labour fought to reinvent post-war social democracy, reshaping its core political ideas. It charts Labour’s sporadic recovery from political disaster in the 1980s, successfully making the arduous journey from opposition to power with the rise (and ultimately fall) of the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Forty years on from the 1979 debacle, Labour has found itself on the edge of oblivion once again. Defeated in 2010, it entered a further cycle of degeneration and decline. Like social democratic parties across Europe, Labour failed to identify a fresh ideological rationale in the aftermath of the great financial crisis. Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews and unpublished papers, the book focuses on decisive points of transformational change in the party’s development raising a perennial concern of present-day debate – namely whether Labour is a party capable of transforming the ideological weather, shaping a new paradigm in British politics, or whether it is a party that should be content to govern within parameters established by its Conservative opponents. This text will be of interest to the general reader as well as scholars and students of British politics, British political party history, and the history of the British Labour Party since 1918.

This book presents new, cross-disciplinary research on leprosy in medieval Europe, focusing on questions of identity. It reveals complex responses to the disease, challenging earlier views that medieval sufferers were uniformly stigmatised. The social, religious and cultural impacts are explored, as are post-medieval perspectives.

Where other books are either highly partisan dismissals or appreciations of the Third Way, or dull sociological accounts, this book gets behind the clichés in order to show just what is left of Labour party ideology and what the future may hold. New Labour has changed the face of Britain. Culture, class, education, health, the arts, leisure, the economy have all seen seismic shifts since the 1997 election that raised Blair to power. The Labour that rules has distanced itself from the failed Labour of the 70s and 80s, but the core remains. Labour remains gripped by its own past - unable and unwilling to shed its ties to the old Labour party, but determined to avoid the mistakes of which lead to four electoral defeats between 1979 and 1992. Cronin covers the full history of the party from its post war triumph through decades of shambolic leadership against ruthless and organised opposition to the resurgent New Labour of the 90s that finally took Britain into the new millennium.

Andrew Thorpe's book rapidly established itself as the leading single-volume history of the Labour Party. This second edition takes the story to 2000 with a new chapter on the development of "New Labour" and the Blair government. The reasons for the party's formation, its aims and achievements, its failure to achieve office more often, and its remarkable recovery since its problems in the 1980s, as well as key events and leading personalities, are all discussed.