This book is about much more than the interwar radical politics of Scotland's four largest cities: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. Malcom Petrie's argues that political developments in these four cities can be used as a window through which to view the broader transformation of British political culture in the aftermath of full democratization in the two-stage franchise reforms of 1918 and 1928. As Petrie points out, we now possess a series of subtle explorations of how Conservatism sought to adapt its culture and practices to the new mass electorate after 1918, but no comparable exploration for Labour and the left. Democracy, it is assumed, posed no threat to the left. Historians may debate how much Labour benefited from the so-called franchise factor, but they have not generally recognized the fundamental challenge it posed to a British radical tradition steeped in both the politics of exclusion and the politics of place. After 1918, Petrie argues, politics became decisively more inclusive and national, leaving many radicals embracing discursive positions (class politics) and cultural practices (disruption and disorderly protest) that came to appear anachronistic and illegitimate. As he explains early on, Petrie's intention is to offer “an interpretive account of the remodeling of interwar politics, of the strains between local and national loyalties in an age of mass democratic participation, and, ultimately, of the end of a popular radical tradition bounded by its appeal to confrontational local identities and modes of political participation” (2–3). Petrie's claim is that the radical left failed between the wars because it misread the social and cultural implications of mass democracy and of an increasingly national mass media. Initially, most Labour Party activists shared the local, oppositional instincts of the radical left—they, too, were products of the plebeian radical tradition. This changed in the mid-1920s. Alienated by Communist militancy in electoral politics during the General Strike and finally in the official, anti-Labour “class against class” policy, Labour activists increasingly aligned themselves with the reformist, programmatic politics of the party leadership epitomized by its policy document Labour and the Nation (1928).

Overall, this is a bold and refreshing thesis that deserves to be widely read. Petrie pulls together many trends in recent British historiography and uses them to say something new and important about the country's transition to democracy after 1918. But perhaps inevitably in a short volume, there are places where Petrie's radical interpretation could do with more fleshing out to be wholly convincing. It is a pity, for instance, that we are not told more about the radical traditions of the four cities before 1914. Precisely because plebeian radicalism tended to be rooted in the class-inflected politics of place, different localities generated subtly different political traditions. Much depended on the willingness or otherwise of local middle-class radicals to accommodate the causes, and the representational claims, of working-class radicals. As it is, we largely have to accept on trust that the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party built on historic, local radical traditions in the four cities. We are also expected largely to accept Petrie's claim that the General Strike represented a disastrous “fiasco” (153) that accelerated Labour activists’ embrace of a more resolutely reformist, national program that eschewed the politics of class. We are told that the General Strike “tested to destruction the belief that a separate working-class political sphere, opposed to the state, could be constructed at a local level” (27), but we are not shown this happening, on the ground, in Scotland's major urban conurbations. We know that nationally many trade union leaders saw the strike as their chance finally to purge the syndicalist reflexes of 1918–1921 from the labor movement, but did local trade unionist leaders take a similar perspective? Elsewhere, there is evidence that communist militancy weakened local trade union officials’ willingness to defend traditions of left unity that had been forged in the industrial and political upheavals of the past decade and a half. Did something similar happen across urban Scotland after 1926? This question matters because Petrie's central argument is that reformism was not imposed on a class-conscious labor movement from above, but rather grew organically, from below, as local trade unionists and Labour activists came to adapt to the mediated, national culture of the new interwar polity. The idea is compelling, but it would have been helpful to have a sharper focus on the figures who spearheaded this reorientation of left traditions on the ground. Were trade unionists affiliated to large, national organizations more amenable to the new politics than those belonging to local or regional trade unions, or to those outside the trade union movement? Petrie has opened up new questions about the political culture of the left between the wars, but there remains much still to understand.