Your Britain

Media and the Making of the Labour Party

Laura Beers

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780674252356
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the early twentieth century, new mass media—popular newspapers, radio, film—exploded at the same time that millions of Britons received the vote in the franchise expansions of 1918 and 1928. The growing centrality of the commercial media to democratic life quickly became evident as organizations of all stripes saw its potential to reach new voters. The new media presented both an exciting opportunity and a significant challenge to the new Labour Party.Laura Beers traces Labour's rise as a movement for working-class men to its transformation into a national party that won a landslide victory in 1945. Key to its success was a skillful media strategy designed to win over a broad, diverse coalition of supporters. Though some in the movement harbored reservations about a socialist party making use of the "capitalist" commercial media, others advocated using the media to hammer home the message that Labour represented not only its traditional base but also women, office workers, and professionals. Labour's national leadership played a pivotal role in the effective use of popular journalism, the BBC, and film to communicate its message to the public. In the process Labour transformed not only its own national profile but also the political process in general.New Labour's electoral success of the late twentieth century was due in no small part to its grasp of media communication. This insightful book reminds us that the importance of the mass media to Labour's political fortunes is by no means a modern phenomenon.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rise of a Mass Media Culture

ON 6 NOVEMBER 1935, Herbert Morrison, the leader of the London County Council (LCC) and former minister of transport, delivered the Labour Party’s final radio broadcast before the general election on 14 November. Born in Brixton in 1888, the son of a police constable and a domestic servant, he had risen through the ranks of the Independent Labour Party to become one of the most prominent men not only in London, but in national politics.¹ Though a skilled politician, Morrison, like his grandson Peter Mandelson, was fundamentally a political strategist, and Labour’s victory in the 1934 LCC elections owed much to his organizational capabilities. The broad mix of peoples and socioeconomic classes in London meant that he had had to design an electoral campaign that would appeal across economic, professional, cultural, and gender divides. A year and a half later, he was keen to apply the same strategy in the national arena, and the National Executive Committee (NEC) had such faith in his appeal that they allotted him one of Labour’s four broadcasts, despite the fact that he had lost his parliamentary seat in 1931 and had not been a member of the 1931–1935 Parliament.

Morrison’s speech was broadcast on the BBC’s national and regional programs and was heard by an estimated 40 percent of the population, including nearly a third of middle-class electors.² He used the occasion to stress the achievements of the London Labour government and the potential for Labour to make similar strides on a national level. “The nation,” he claimed, “must now decide between Tory negation and the positive and constructive policy of the modern Labour Party.” He concluded with an appeal to all Britons, regardless of class or gender: “The working and middle classes love their country with love that is real and enduring. Their patriotism is the patriotism of service and not that of possession. . . . That is the patriotism of the Labour Party.”³

The broadcast exemplifies the changes that had taken place in British politics over the previous half century. In less than fifty years, British politics had been transformed from an elite club composed of and representative of a narrow stratum of property-owning men into a mass democracy. By 1935, nearly all men and women over the age of twenty-one were eligible to elect a parliament that, while still dominated by middle-class men, included a growing contingent of working-class and female representatives. Nine women were elected to Parliament in 1935, and, by the end of the 1935 parliament, there were 90 Labour members of Parliament (MPs) classified as either trade union or ex-trade union secretaries, or members of the manual working class.⁴ The rapid expansion of the electorate—the number of Britons eligible to vote quadrupled between 1884 and 1928—had occasioned a profound shift in the issues and emphases of party politics. The two traditional parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, responded to working-class enfranchisement with an increased emphasis on social legislation.⁵ This political reorientation was encouraged by the creation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in February 1900, which proclaimed itself the defender of working-class interests in Parliament. The partial enfranchisement of women in 1918 and the subsequent granting of the vote to women on equal terms with men in 1928 put pressure on all three parties to adapt their politics to appeal to these new electors, who outnumbered men in four out of five interwar constituencies.⁶

The arrival of mass democracy altered not only the content, but also the conduct of British politics. Whereas Victorian politics had relied much more heavily on public participatory encounters, twentieth-century politics was an increasingly impersonal affair, with electors “meeting” their representatives via the pages of their morning paper, ministerial and party political broadcasts, and cinema newsreels. Traditional methods of political communication—public meetings, rallies, and educational propaganda—did not disappear from British politics after the First World War, but they were increasingly inadequate in a political world where the average number of electors in a constituency had risen from around ten thousand to fifty thousand. In such a context, the outcome of election contests, particularly the three-cornered contests that characterized the 1920s, might be determined by a small number of floating voters (a term first coined in the 1930s) who could not be guaranteed to engage with traditional forms of public political debate.⁷

National newspaper circulations grew rapidly in the first decades of the twentieth century; by 1939, the circulation of the major London daily papers was over 10.5 million, and the average Londoner read 1.25 morning papers.⁸ The expansion of national newspaper readership was coupled with a consolidation of ownership and a decline of readership of the regional and local press, with the result that voters from Yorkshire to the Midlands increasingly took their news from London. Radio ownership also grew exponentially in the two decades after the formation of the BBC in October 1922. Cinema attendance similarly boomed. The growing importance of marketing and advertising changed the way in which consumers (and increasingly voters) were conceptualized, understood, and addressed.⁹

These changes were, of course, not limited to Britain. What became known as the “Northcliffe Revolution” in the style and content of the daily press was similar to developments within the Hearst and Pulitzer newspaper chains in the United States, or the French evening paper Paris-Soir, or L’Ami du Peuple, which Orwell famously described as seeking, “by hook or by crook,” to outsell its competition and “strangle free speech in France,” and not worth the cut-rate cost of ten centimes which its proprietors charged for it.¹⁰ But while part of a wider international cultural revolution, the consequences of these changes were more acutely felt in Britain due to the unparalleled importance of London in the nation’s cultural and political life. The development of the mass media helped drive a renegotiation of the relationship between political parties and the public after the First World War, with the media playing a significantly larger role in political communication.

Morrison was particularly well suited to this new style of mass politics. He instinctively conceptualized the British public in terms of demographics—trade unionists, clerks, secretaries and other “black-coated” workers, housewives, middle-class suburbanites—and his political appeals were constructed to reach across social and cultural divides and unite these disparate interests.¹¹ Morrison’s speeches, propaganda literature, and broadcasts were littered with words such as “nation,” “patriotism,” “constructive,” and “modern.” The London leader was comfortable with the new modes of political communication, and particularly with visual propaganda and broadcasting. He appreciated the value of well-produced publicity, and would, according to one BBC producer, go to “any amount of trouble” to get his broadcasts just right.¹² In this sense, he differed profoundly from other politicians, and particularly many members of the Labour Party, who were initially less inclined to embrace the potentialities of the new mass media culture.

While new media technologies allowed for new methods of political communication, such changes to the practice of politics could not have occurred without the simultaneous democratization of British cultural consumption in the first decades of the twentieth century. The extent of culture democratization in this period has been debated by historians; nonetheless, it is clear that, to an unprecedented degree, interwar Britons shared in a national media culture.¹³ Even before the emergence of the new mass media, the rise of display advertising had reshaped the visual landscape of urban Britain. Commercial advertisements on sandwich boards, billboards, and omnibuses bombarded the eyes of urban men and women from the mid-Victorian period onwards. In 1902, John Dewar & Sons (makers of the world-renowned Scotch whiskey) constructed a multistory illuminated tower depicting the company’s mascot on the north bank of the Thames River between the Blackfriars and Waterloo bridges—the largest illuminated sign in Europe.¹⁴ The cultural historian Lynda Nead has described display advertising as an “extreme instanc[e] of the visual presentation and consumption of London. . . . Modernity was understood to be a visual phenomenon and its most characteristic forms were those which spoke to the eye.”¹⁵ These beacons of modernity spoke to the working-class as well as the middle-class observer and worked to “evoke an imaginary ‘community of spenders’ . . . [and] forge new kinds of allegiance which often cut across the boundaries of both class and locality.”¹⁶ Commercial advertising also had a profound effect on the presentation of politics, as political parties adapted modes of commercial communication to the needs of modern politics.¹⁷

The “community of spenders” was given further coherence from the rise of the film industry in the early 1900s. In the decades between the wars, men and women from all classes and all regions of Britain went to the cinema in record numbers.¹⁸ By 1939, an average of twenty-three million Britons, out of a population of just under fifty million, attended the cinema each week. Women, young people, and members of the working class went to the cinema more frequently than the older, wealthier, and better educated; nonetheless, the middle classes were frequent cinemagoers throughout the period as well.¹⁹ Price differentials between theatres and between seating sections within the metropolitan picture palaces meant that mistresses and maids rarely sat side by side at the cinema—a circumstance that Evelyn Waugh parodies in his novel Put Out More Flags. Waugh’s upper-class heroine Angela drunkenly insists on sitting in the cheap seats at the front of the theatre on the grounds that she “want[s] to be near, in the three and sixpennies,” not decorously far away in the “5 and 9s”—a demand that upsets the composure of the cinema staff.²⁰ Nonetheless, the explosion in cinema attendance led inevitably to a certain cultural homogenization as moviegoers came to admire the same stars and mimic the same styles.

This “star culture” had a visible impact on women’s fashion. Hollywood starlets—with a few exceptions such as the British actress Vivien Leigh, most interwar movie stars were American²¹—became fashion icons for both middle- and working-class British women. And while the typical working-class woman could not afford the Hollywood-inspired fashions on display in department store windows, she was usually able to approximate the look with a sewing machine and a dress pattern ordered through the pages of the women’s press. The feminist historian Sally Alexander has argued: “In this way, via the high street or the sewing-machine, the mantle of glamour passed from the aristocrat and courtesan to the shop, office or factory girl via the film star.”²² Similarities in dress were augmented by similarities in makeup and hairstyle, as lipstick, nail varnish, and salon permanents became regular features of both working-class and middle-class life.²³ The result, as J. B. Priestley famously put it, was that “for the first time in history Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress . . . Jill beautifies herself exactly as her mistress does.”²⁴ The perception of collapsing cultural differences between young women in this period was evident in political appeals to women voters after 1928—while parties differentiated such appeals between old and young, there was little attempt to disaggregate the “flapper” electorate on the basis of class.

This cultural homogenization was similarly evident in newspaper readership as national mass-market dailies replaced the smaller, more market-differentiated publications of the nineteenth century. Though publications such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express have since shifted downmarket, in the interwar period these papers were middle-brow publications with a much broader cross-class appeal. The interwar popular press did not cater only to “the working-class political culture where opinions lent more to patriotism, empire and monarchism and where the mood favoured sport, gambling drink and sex.”²⁵ Mass-market newspapers were not only read by the likes of Mrs. Maggs and Betty, the archetypal working-class women of 1920s Conservative Party literature. Middle-class men like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings were also avid consumers of the popular press,²⁶ as were upper-class readers like Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs. Stitch, an addict of the crossword puzzle in the parodic Daily Beast.²⁷ In 1939, two-thirds of the middle class read one of the four popular broadsheets discussed below. In comparison, less than 15...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Rise of a Mass Media Culture
• 2 Speaking to the People
• 3 The Anti-Labour Turn
• 4 Changing Attitudes in the 1920s
• 5 The Labour Alternative
• 6 Battling for Public Opinion
• 7 Rapprochement with the Media
• 8 Experimenting in the 1930s
• 9 Election Victory
• 10 Impacts and Influences
• Conclusion
• Archives Consulted
• Notes
• Index