A Sealed Tomb: The Labour Left's 'Wilderness Years', 1988-2015

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While focused studies and broader histories of the Labour Left have focused on the zenith of the Left's power in the early 1980s, its later fragmentation and marginalisation has yet to be fully explored beyond the most highly partisan of accounts, often ignored completely in favour of narrative histories of gradual "modernisation". In particular, this latter interpretation has shaped both the popular memory of the Labour Party, and much of Labour's historiography. This DPhil will aim to redress this conspicuous gap in the literature to fully explore Labour Left's so-called "wilderness years" of political and organisational isolation from 1988 to 2015. While this will aid growing interest in understanding the "origins" of figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Left in this period is significant in its own right as a study of changing strategies and ideas within a marginalised political movement. While subjected to a culture of political and organisational isolation, evidence suggests the "wilderness years" was more than a period of political hibernation. While isolated both from media attention and the leadership, the Labour Left remained a dynamic and often innovative intellectual and activist force, which continued to develop and change along with the party's internal dynamics, and the wider context of modern Britain. My research will aim to examine this activity, and how the Labour Left was not only able to survive as a small political network, but also achieve some key moments of successful resistance. This study will also explore the Left's relation not only to the leadership and government, but even the party itself, in particular the frequent debates over whether the Left could continue within Labour or outside of it through a new Socialist Party. Meanwhile, areas of ideological innovation will not only concern the high-political issues of the state but also concerns of personal identity such as gender and race, and trans-national solidarities as well as the construction of local networks at regional, town, or constituency-level. A focus on the role of "space" and local solidarities will prove particularly illustrative on how key political actors and organisations remained active during this period and help to contribute to a recently growing area of scholarly interest in modern British history. The role of the Socialist Campaign Group will act as an illustrative case study of how marginalised MPs organised themselves, alongside the ideological and campaigning work of other internal and external left-wing groups such as the Grassroots Alliance and Compass. Such studies will not only provide a rich insight into the changing strategies of the respective groups through diverse written sources, but also illuminate how networks of solidarity were formed with often disparate political groups. Understanding both how these groups organised and campaigned as well as how they perceived their own political strategies and goals will also prove illuminating in analysing how the later Labour Left drew on past experiences as well as pre-existing ideas, networks and strategies. My research will draw both on the personal accounts, diaries and memoirs of the period along with extensive archival research, particularly NEC minutes, the archives of key individuals such as Neil Kinnock and Bernie Grant, along with research into the results of internal elections and votes, which I believe will prove illuminating of the party's changing internal-dynamics. I aim to supplement this with oral history interviews with prominent figures of the Left from the period, including Mark Seddon, Neal Lawson, Jon Cruddas and Liz Davies. An examination of these hitherto unexplored and potentially more candid personal perspective of the period offer an unrivalled understanding of the modern British Left, as well as an exploration of the importance of memory in shaping understandings of Labour's frequently contested history.