'Selling socialism': Labour, democracy and the mass media, 1900--1939

This thesis highlights the role of the mass media in the British Labour party's political growth in the interwar period and in its successful displacement of the Liberal party. While the expansion of the franchise and the social and economic changes following the First World War provided an opportunity for Labour, they cannot alone explain the party's rapid rise. Labour's media policy played a critical role in changing public opinion of the party, and counteracting prejudices that Labour politicians were incompetent, irresponsible, or dangerously revolutionary. Previous scholarship has emphasized the Conservative party's strategy of deploying a rhetoric of nationalism and "Englishness" against what it alleged to be the sectional and alien interests of the so-called "Socialist" party, while neglecting Labour responses to such Conservative strategies. This thesis argues that, in the late-1920s and the 1930s, Labour made surprisingly sophisticated use of the popular press and the radio to project an image of itself as a truly national party, representing all of the productive elements of British society, male and female, working-class and middle-class. It underscores the tensions within the British Left over the emergence of new forms of commercial media in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and the contested relationship between these new media and the conduct of democratic politics. In emphasizing Labour's often successful exploitation of the mass media in the late-1920s and 1930s, it focuses attention on the changes in political communication and political culture which occurred across the political spectrum in the interwar period, and the growing importance of national political organization and propaganda.;Drawing on trade union, Labour and Conservative party sources, BBC and press evidence, opinion surveys, and private papers, and making use of case studies of key industrial disputes, election campaigns and political crises to highlight developments in Labour's media strategy, this thesis provides the most comprehensive study to date of Labour's relationship with the mass media, and emphasizes the importance of the party's national publicity strategy to its emergence as the second party of the state, its recovery after the 1931 crisis, and its ultimate victory in the 1945 General Election.