1980s books feature Articles

Lessons for today from Fightback! Fightback! Labour’s Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s, by Dianne Hayter, tells the story of the ‘stayers’. Of those who remained in the party after the Social Democratic party split of 1981, and with courage and determination...

What Hammer of the Left can tell us now John Golding, employment minister in James Callaghan’s government and my predecessor-but-one, died all too prematurely, aged just 67. His funeral took place on the day my eldest was born, so I paid my last respects by writing...

Keep ‘cybernat’ politics at bay At 242 pages, Michael Crick’s book on Labour in the 1980s and how the far left dominated its politics, The March of Militant, is one of the shortest on this period of the party’s history. But I would argue it is one of the most...