Items related to Last Time: Labour's Lessons from the Sixties

Last Time: Labour's Lessons from the Sixties - Softcover

Austin Mitchell; David Wienir

 
9781857251203: Last Time: Labour's Lessons from the Sixties

About the Author

AUSTIN MITCHELL has been the Labour Member of Parliament for Great Gimsby since 1977. A former official fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, he was elected after a career as a political science lecturer in New Zealand and as a broadcaster and journalist with the BBC and Yorkshire Television. Author of several books on the Labour Party, New Zealand and Yorkshire.

DAVID WIENIR, prior to this publication, was the host of the political commentary broadcast "Estonia Today" on Estonia National Radio. Educated at Columbia, Oxford, and The London School of Economics.

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FROM THE PREFACE

This book follows the techniques of "Election 64" in letting those who made history tell the story in their own words. Why impose retrospective frameworks or the views of those who weren't there when the people who were - all Labour in this volume, then if not now - tell it so much better? We've talked to all who would talk to us and we're deeply grateful to them for their time, their courtesy and their recollections. They bring alive a time when one author was in a happier land far away and the other wasn't even born (no prizes for guessing which).

We've concentrated on the two threads of the story of the second postwar Labour government which are most relevant to today's politics. How Labour can win and hold power and how Labour governments succeed or fail by their handling of the real economy. With hindsight the government of 1964-70 threw away a great opportunity. That's our perspective. Those who participated don't necessarily acept it. Indeed, several disagree, but all their views are represented so that thirty years later we can understand what happened and those who resume Labour's Sisyphean task of rolling the stone of progress up the hill can learn the lessons of last time...

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