Redefining British Politics

A history of modern British political culture, Redefining British Politics discusses organisations, ideas, movements, identities, moments and individuals that transcend the spheres of political and social change. These include the Consumers' Association founded by Michael Young; the Co-op as a similar attempt to fuse consumer politics in a social movement; the Young Conservatives as a chiefly social, but nonetheless party political presence in civil society; Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers' and Listeners' Association that campaigned on issues of morality on TV; Arnold Wesker's radical cultural initiatives in Centre 42; and finally, how politics was itself represented in popular culture and used marketing and TV to communicate with voters. Set against the context of relative affluence and cultural change in 1950s and 1960s Britain, it probes whether political behaviour and subject matter became more post-materialist. It addresses identification with party, but also the development of newer forms of pressure groups and social movements and moral, cultural and consumer agendas. It uses these to explore politics' relationship with the wider society and how the shifting category of 'the political' included more than traditional areas of historical focus like party, elections and policy. Its approach is more a cultural history of politics than a political history. As such it assesses popular participation in politics, the salience and reception of political languages and practices and incorporates everyday indifference as part of political culture that, it argues, in key respects was not, by conventional measures, notably political.