Working Class and Politics in Europe and America 1929-1945, The by Stephen Salter John Stevenson

Author:Stephen Salter, John Stevenson [Stephen Salter, John Stevenson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317901990
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Cole’s prescient categorization of the voters in the ‘new England’ of the 1930s as also those with less sense of class identification was to become one of the recurrent concerns of Labour in the post-war world.

Nor was it clear that the Labour Party had overcome the apathy or indifference of a sizeable portion of the working-class electorate. Apathy or indifference has yet to find its historian, but the issue of a working class indifferent to the appeals of politicians, whether of Left or Right, was not magically dissolved by the introduction of universal suffrage. Although the ‘residuum’ of those in absolute poverty was diminishing between the wars, the world of slum districts like ‘Campbell Bunk’ was as yet largely untouched by either organized labour or the Labour Party. Municipal turnouts were often low, even Labour’s assault on the LCC in 1934 was successful on the basis of a very low poll. Although there were very active Labour wards and constituencies with something approaching a mass membership, there were many others kept alive by only a handful of activists. At its peak between the wars in 1937 the Labour Party had 447,000 members, only 1.5 per cent of the total electorate. Moreover the depression did not seem to have increased the electorate’s appetite for politics; turnout in 1931 was only fractionally greater than in 1929 and less than in 1924; in 1935 it was 5 per cent lower still at 71.2 per cent. Three out of ten electors did not bother to cast their vote. That a large proportion of non-voters were working class seems likely on the evidence of social surveys carried out during the late 1930s. When the Carnegie Trust published a study it had conducted in Liverpool, Cardiff, and Glasgow between 1936 and 1939 it reported that out of a total of 1,490 young unemployed only 20 were members of a political organization and at least 10 per cent did not even know the names of the various political parties: ‘The overwhelming majority of the men had no political convictions whatsoever. When asked why, they invariably replied, “what does it matter?”’40

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