In 2005 Matthew Worley published both a useful synoptic history of the interwar Labour Party (Labour Inside the Gate [London: I. B. Tauris]) and an important edited collection of essays (Labour's Grass-Roots [Farnham: Ashgate]). This second collection of essay builds on the themes of these earlier works, while extending their focus backward to include late Victorian and Edwardian socialist and Labour politics (despite the title a number of essays devote considerable attention to developments in the 1890s). The collection draws together the work of a broad range of scholars and engages with many key themes in Labour Party historiography, including gender politics, socialism and religion, the Co-operative movement, the languages of Labour politics, and the relationship between Labour and the trades unions. Perhaps inevitably, the quality of the thirteen essays is a little uneven, but there is much to commend here.

In the only biographical chapter, Robert Taylor provides a welcome study of the early career of Labour leader J. R. Clynes, demonstrating that in many respects he embodied Labour's “foundations.” Clynes combined an idealistic, ethical socialism, honed as a founder-member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), with the pragmatism and worldliness of the trade union leader struggling to organize unskilled and semiskilled workers in a hostile environment. Andrew Taylor builds on his earlier studies of miners' politics between the wars by providing a useful overview of the evolving relationship between union and party leaders, especially after the defeat of 1926. Peter Catterall performs a similar role in his chapter on Labour and religion, offering a concise, nicely judged assessment of Labour's relationship with both organized religion and wider religious sensibilities that will provide a valuable addition to many reading lists. Nicole Robertson usefully surveys the often fraught relationship between the Labour and Co-operative parties at both the national and local level but says less about the culture of cooperation and its impact on Labour politics. Laura Beers provides a valuable chapter arguing that we need to study interwar Labour propaganda within its wider discursive context, which, she suggests, was largely shaped by the powerful antisocialist messages disseminated by the Conservative Central Office (ably reinforced by the national press). Unlike most chapters, Beers's focus is thus resolutely national and paints a picture of a party always on the back foot—conscious of the need to counter tory attacks even as it sought to convey a positive politics of reform and social change.

By contrast, Matthew Worley's chapter returns to the theme of Labour's “grass-roots” by exploring the contribution of the divisional (constituency) Labour parties to Labour's gradual expansion beyond its industrial heartlands after 1918. Worley plausibly argues that the constituency parties provided an invaluable national network through which Labour was able to realize its ambition to be more than a narrow, sectional party of organized (largely male) manual workers (to be, in short, the “people's party” that Arthur Henderson had envisaged in 1918 when he inaugurated both the local party structure and individual party membership). Necessary perhaps, but not sufficient; as Ross McKibbin argues in Parties and People: England, 1914–1951 (Oxford, 2010), Labour's breakthrough was the result, not of a long forward march at the grassroots, but of a sudden, and contingent, collapse of Baldwin's antisocialist “National” politics at the outbreak of war in 1939–40. For sure, Labour's rival claim to embody “National” values was boosted by its organizational inroads across suburban and rural Britain, but it was the party's sustained campaign of “counter-toryism” (as Beers terms it) at the national level that did most to prepare the ideological ground for the “‘People's War.”

Other chapters providing valuable, research-based historiographical overviews include June Hannam's nicely nuanced assessment of “Women and Labour Politics” before 1939, and Gidon Cohen's deconstruction of changing approaches to the history of the ILP, both within and without the “movement.” Cohen usefully stresses the importance of decoding the party's “foundation myths,” although he overlooks a good deal of earlier work in this field. Similarly, Chris Wrigley provides a useful overview of Labour's relations with Continental socialism before 1920 but strangely fails to engage with Duncan Tanner's groundbreaking explorations of the same subject in the 1990s. Combined with an above-average number of typographical and stylistic errors, these historiographical omissions suggest that the volume may have been pulled together with undue haste. But for all that, it contains enough essays of real breadth and quality to justify its inclusion on all but the leanest library acquisition budget.