Even a casual glance at this latest addition to Longman’s series of Companions to History is enough to betray its subject. The Prime Minister is seen, sitting in a first‐dass railway carriage, listening intently to his mobile phone, the very model of a modern New Labour politician. Inside, the reader will find a comprehensive collection of information about the Labour Party, each section being usually set out chronologically, a method which leads to a certain amount of repetition from chapter to chapter. While some sections are extremely up‐to‐date (that on the policies of Labour governments stretches to October 1998) others, evidently deriving from existing reference books, are less so: it would, for instance, not have been difficult to extend the table of rates of unemployment before, during and after Labour governments to 1997 at least, rather than only to 1980.
The majority of the book is devoted to several chapters chronicling periods of the party’s history from its nineteenth‐century predecessors to the present. Naturally, these are more detailed for the periods when Labour was in government, for which are included lists of ministers and useful digests of the principal government measures. In earlier chapters are lists of election results, party membership, Labour leaders and deputies, party conference decisions, and significant by‐election gains and losses (though why is the Govan by‐election of 1988 not there?). Later chapters are thematic, covering such topics as nationalisation, Labour and trade unions, Labour and the left, devolution in Scotland and Wales, Labour and women, and ethnic minorities. They are not infallible. It is stated that at the General Election of 1970, the Scottish National Party returned six MPs: the real figure was one. A substantial section covers biographies of notable Labour politicians, past and present: whereas most of these can be easily found in other reference books, a few were new to me, such as John Archer, who was the first black mayor of a London borough as early as 1913.
The chapter which is least likely to duplicate material published elsewhere is a glossary covering concepts (“Entryism”), institutions (“the block vote”), movements (“the loony left”), documents (“the national plan”), places (“Millbank”) and even phrases (“we are the masters now”) significant in Labour history. It was revealing to discover, for instance, that we owe the phrase “the Welfare State” not to a politician, but to Archbishop William Temple. Finally appear a substantial (though selective) critical bibliography, and a quite comprehensive index. This compendium will surely be essential both to politicians and historians, and it may be hoped that the publishers will follow it up with similar volumes devoted to the rival parties.
