Labour history Articles

Barbara Castle could have been Britain’s first female prime minister. Born Barbara Betts in 1910 in Pontefract, her mother was a Labour councillor, her father a tax inspector. She later moved to Bradford, where she attended the girls’ grammar school, before attending...

George Lansbury is probably best known as the Christian pacifist who led the Labour party from 1932 to 1935. As one of only three government ministers who kept their seats in Labour’s 1931 general election defeat (the other two were Clement Attlee and Stafford...

Recent weeks have marked the anniversary of Labour’s landslide general election victory of 1945. Though the election itself was held on 5 July, the logistical exercise of collecting and counting votes from service personnel all around the globe meant that the results...

Leo Abse was arguably the 20th century’s most influential backbench member of parliament. Born in Cardiff on 22 April 1917, he read law at the London School of Economics. During the second world war, he served in the RAF, and was in Egypt when the ‘Forces Parliament’...