The 1920s witnessed dramatic changes to the democratic structure in Britain and to the technological and social organization of culture. After nearly a century of gradual and controlled expansion, the franchise quadrupled in the decade after the First World War, bringing the vote to nearly all British citizens—male and female—over the age of twenty-one. At the same time, the role of the mass media in national culture and national political life was changing dramatically. Developments in cable—and later wireless telegraphy—as well as in printing technology brought more and more up-to-date news and entertainment to a greater number of people than ever before.Footnote ¹ Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail, the first “popular” newspaper in Britain, was launched in 1896, and by the 1930s, the five largest popular dailies had reached a combined circulation of over 10 million and many families in London were subscribing to more than one daily paper.Footnote ² The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) was founded in 1922, and by the outbreak of the Second World War, nearly every home in Britain had a licensed radio set.Footnote ³ Cinema attendance skyrocketed as well: by 1930 an average of 20 million Britons attended the pictures every week,Footnote ⁴ and some 2,000 new theaters were built between 1926 and 1939.Footnote ⁵ The ubiquity of the new mass media eroded previous barriers between high and low culture, with the result that, in the newly democratized Britain, citizens not only voted together but increasingly took their news and entertainment from the same sources. The interwar period saw the emergence of what Dan LeMahieu has termed “a culture for democracy,” not only in Britain but also throughout much of Europe and the United States.Footnote ⁶

This new democratic culture affected not only patterns of leisure and popular culture but also the content and conduct of mass politics. The popular press, in particular, became a vital medium of political communication. Yet, over the past half century, its role in democratic politics and culture has come under considerable criticism. Jurgen Habermas equated the rise of the “commercial mass circulation press” with the decline of the political public sphere, as the new mass parties used the press to “‘[take] hold’ of the voters temporarily and mov[e] them to provide acclamation, without attempting to remedy their political immaturity.”Footnote ⁷ In Britain, New Left theorists tended to endorse the equation between mass journalism and political immaturity, viewing the popular press as an agent of political apathy and cynicism through its glorification of parochialism and triviality.Footnote ⁸ Raymond Williams, at least, was quick to emphasize that the new techniques of mass communication that emerged in the early twentieth century “[were] at worst neutral” and as amenable to transmitting “art, education, [and] the giving of information or opinion” as “manipulation.”Footnote ⁹ Yet, such critics, nearly all of whom hail from the left of the political spectrum, have focused their attention on the negative impact of the mass media and have shown little appreciation for the extent to which the media allowed for the expansion and popularization of left-wing political debate throughout the western world in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, a significant faction within the British Left shared the cultural and political pessimism of later critics and regarded the emergence of the so-called capitalist press with suspicion and hostility, arguing that its encroachment into politics undermined the educationalist mission of Labour Party propagandists and contravened both the moral and practical interests of Labour.Footnote ¹⁰ However, such anxieties were ultimately trumped by a recognition of the potential value of the mass media as a vehicle for bringing Labour news and views to a broad national audience. For many, this recognition was matched by a confidence that, used judiciously, the popular press could even play a healthy role in British political life.

The following discussion traces the debates within the British Left over the appropriate role of the popular press within the political process in the first decades of the twentieth century and examines the consequences of these debates for the conduct of Labour politics. It draws attention to both the competing beliefs and attitudes that fought for ascendance in this period and the changing historical and political context that allowed different views to triumph at different periods in Labour's history. While it argues that advocates of utilizing the mass media in political practice ultimately triumphed in the late 1920s, it emphasizes the continued importance of political education and rational discourse within the British Labour movement. Further, it underscores the relationship between Labour's embrace of the popular press and other national media in the late-1920s and 1930s and the party's commitment to a “national” political strategy in this period. The mass media played an important role in bringing Labour's policies to the attention of voters outside of the party's core constituencies, and the concluding section of this article makes use of recent work on interwar local and national elections to suggest that Labour's exploitation of the national media aided the party's political progress in this period to a greater extent than has previously been appreciated.

Scholars have tended to assume that the hostile relationship that existed between the British Labour movement and the popular press in the mid-1920s was also characteristic of the periods that preceded and succeeded this decade.Footnote ¹¹ However, the mid-1920s represented a uniquely virulent period in Labour's relations with the mass media. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, in contrast, the Labour leadership had shown an active interest in new developments in mass psychology and in new forms of mediated propaganda and political communication. The party's and the trade union leadership's initial willingness to make use of new techniques in print propaganda in the 1900s and 1910s highlights the contradictory forces at work within the British Left in the early twentieth century and the importance of political pragmatism and openness to innovation in Labour's early political history.Footnote ¹² Maurice Cowling's description of Labour as the “party of propaganda” encompassed not just its organization of canvassers and platform speakers but also its impressive use of literature and poster art.Footnote ¹³ During the 1906 election campaign, R. P. Houston, Unionist MP for West Toxteth, accused his Labour opponent of being “intelligent and advanced” in his use of publicity and “up to date in the matter of advertisements.” Houston's opponent had made use of emotive pictorial posters, processions, and imaginative publicity stunts to associate the Unionist candidate with the alleged evils of Chinese slavery.Footnote ¹⁴ The Edwardian Party leadership's acceptance that less complex and didactic propaganda was essential to political success in the era of mass democracy reflected an open-eyed approach to the changing realities of political communication in the wake of the third, and later the fourth and fifth, reform acts.

To be sure, many within the party itself doubted the benefits of mass democracy. Like Ramsay MacDonald, they suspected that “the majority of people were morally and intellectually lazy and would never consider the merits of a claim if it disturbed their equanimity or their convenience.”Footnote ¹⁵ Such anxieties were not, of course, limited to the Labour Party. Conservative and Liberal leaders feared that franchise expansion would benefit Labour as working-class voters seized the opportunity to vote for the new workers’ party.Footnote ¹⁶ The Liberals in particular held strong reservations about the impact of mass democracy on the British constitutional system and feared the decline of rational political discourse in the wake of the third and fourth reform acts.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet they ultimately proved rather successful in adapting to mass politics in the Edwardian Era.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, much has been written on the Conservative appeal to “working-class Toryism” from the late Victorian Era onward.Footnote ¹⁹ And while Liberal and Conservative political strategies for attracting new working-class voters after 1867 were not entirely centered around irrationalist appeals, the parties proved willing to exploit the new modes of mediated communication that tended to blur the line between politics and entertainment and to simplify and deintellectualize political issues. The failure of a class-conscious democracy to emerge in the wake of the 1884 and 1918 reform acts came as a surprise to all three political parties. But, whereas the Conservatives gradually came to embrace a “less deterministic reading of class” and “learned to distinguish the component elements of the working class … and to appeal to specific interest groups,”Footnote ²⁰ Labour's leaders were slow to recognize that members of the working class might rationally understand their interests to be different than those that it believed they should possess. Many Socialists remained convinced that the lack of political support for Labour was due to the “mental poverty” of the electorate.Footnote ²¹

For many Socialists, this recognition was fueled in part by the experience of mass jingoism during the Boer War and the First World War, which seemed to confirm the supposed capacity of the crowd to be influenced by propaganda and irrational argument.Footnote ²² Ramsay MacDonald cited the work of psychologists such as William Trotter, author of the influential Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, to substantiate his own views of the British “herd” as composed of a “broad margin of electors who take no rational or abiding interest in politics or in their national affairs” and hence ran the risk of “their unawakened subordinate minds” being perverted by capitalist propaganda.Footnote ²³ The Socialist economist J. A. Hobson similarly feared that the “credulity” of the “mass of workers” left them susceptible to being “distracted and beguiled” by forces of Conservatism, and Philip Snowden caustically dismissed the working classes as uneducated and less concerned with political reform than with wasting their money “in drink and gambling.”Footnote ²⁴ Such prejudices were exacerbated by the working classes’ apparent inability to realize their economic self-interest and vote Labour. Given their view that the working classes would not rationally choose to support their political rivals, Labour's leaders were forced to believe that the masses were “manifestly dim-witted” and hence easily hoodwinked “by the sensational poster on the hoarding or headline in the Press.”Footnote ²⁵

Even Labour supporters who paid lip service to the rationality of the democratic electorate, such as Norman Angell, believed in the capacity of modern propaganda and a politically biased media to dupe would-be Labour voters: “Though the waitress or typist may be … capable, inherently or potentially, of sound political judgment, … modern conditions … not only give native common sense and individual judgment less chance against mass suggestion than did conditions a generation or two ago, but the unwisdom of the million is politically much more serious and dangerous now than it was then.”Footnote ²⁶ The above quotation is particularly telling of Labour anxieties about the female electorate—the waitresses and typists. MacDonald, luridly, blamed his 1918 defeat at Leicester on “the women—bloodthirsty, cursing their hate, issuing from the courts and alleys crowded with children, reeking with humanity—the sad flotsam and jetsam of wild emotion.”Footnote ²⁷ Stuart MacIntyre and others have shown how a disdain for the mass mind prevented certain members of the British Left from effectively connecting with the new voters as they proved either unwilling or unable to communicate with the masses on their own terms.Footnote ²⁸

The Labour leadership, however, came to appreciate that, if they were to compete effectively as a mass party, they would have to adapt their political approach to the realities of mass politics. While an aversion to “irrationalism” was an important component of the political culture of Edwardian Socialism, it was not the only component. An overfocus on the moralism of turn-of-the-century Socialist leaders obscures the degree to which MacDonald and his colleagues on the National Executive Committee (NEC) often frankly accepted the utility of irrational or simplistic appeals to encourage electors to vote Labour.Footnote ²⁹ In 1904, MacDonald noted that the party had “prepared a few coloured posters which will put our case in a striking and dramatic way. These posters will … no doubt, by simplifying the issues to the man in the street, considerably influence polling results.”Footnote ³⁰ In 1909, the NEC agreed to pay the hefty fee of £5 5s. per image to the commercial illustrator Gerald Spencer Pryse to produce a series of evocative posters for the party.Footnote ³¹ The posters, which included the famous “Forward! The Day is Breaking!” were described by the Times as “striking” and “of such a character as to arrest the eye and rivet the attention of the passer-by,” and the Labour Party continued to use them throughout the interwar period.Footnote ³²

While posters usually place an emphasis on visual appeals, it would be wrong to dismiss such propaganda as devoid of intellectual content. As Graham Wallas asserted in his discussion of the incorporation of techniques of commercial advertising into politics in 1919, even if the impact of poster art on the viewer was subconscious, “the mental process which is set in action [may well] be as strictly logical as that which occurs when we correctly solve a mathematical problem during sleep.”Footnote ³³ And even posters that openly sought to manipulate viewers’ sympathies could be rationalized as playing an educative role through their distillation of the essential “truths” of a complex argument.Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless, Labour's investment in evocative visual propaganda in the Edwardian Era suggests a nuanced view of political communication that did not see a contradiction between encouraging rational discussion and occasionally “simplifying the issues” or making use of dramatic presentation to sway public opinion.

In the initial aftermath of the First World War, Labour's industrial and political leaders were similarly willing to work through the popular press to communicate their message to the public, despite anxieties about the educational and moral probity of such publications. In November 1918, Arthur Henderson met with Lord Northcliffe and negotiated a scheme whereby the Labour Party would be given column space in the London, continental, and soldiers’ editions of the ^{Daily Mail} and in the London-based Evening Standard to advertise their case to the general public. The four-person staff of the newly created Labour Party Press and Publicity Department set to work drafting a series of columns arguing the merits of Labour's policies. The advantage to which the party put the column space shows a keen appreciation of the principles of what Sidney Webb would later refer to as “stratified electioneering.”Footnote ³⁵ Each column included a testimonial from a representative of a different social group, explaining why all the component members of the British nation should support the party. The columns helped to ensure that those unenlightened citizens who persisted in taking their news from the “capitalist” press would not remain totally deaf to Labour's appeals.

George Lansbury, who owned the pro-Labour ^{Daily Herald} from 1911 until its takeover by the party in 1922, showed a similarly pragmatic approach to the realities of individual reading preferences. He took out advertising space in the Conservative Daily Express on behalf of the party during the 1918 election campaign to ensure that Express readers were aware of Labour's position and that those soldiers who read the Express in France knew that, back in England, “The Labour Party is Fighting for You.”Footnote ³⁶ While the impact of these advertisements is impossible to gauge, the Express was concerned enough about their possible effect to run an accompanying disclaimer explaining to any readers who might get the wrong impression that “the Daily Express takes no responsibility for opinions that appear in its advertising columns. … Our own views are well known to our readers.”Footnote ³⁷ Henderson and Lansbury's willingness to advertise Labour's cause through such papers in 1918 provides an insight into the contradictory approach to popular journalism, not just within the movement more broadly but also within the minds of individual Labour leaders. Both men objected to the newspapers’ use of racing tipsters and other amoral inducements to secure readership, but both were willing to make use of journals that did publish such features if it meant securing a larger audience for Labour views.Footnote ³⁸

Such tactics were again pursued during the national railway strike the following year. The National Union of Railwaymen earmarked £1,500 per day (the initial figure mooted was £2,000) for expenditure on newspaper advertising and poster production, and the union ran daily display advertisements in the popular press explaining the strikers’ case and appealing for sympathy from the middle classes and solidarity from the men's fellow workers.Footnote ³⁹ They also employed the Daily Herald cartoonist Will Dyson to design a pictorial poster intended to create sympathy and solidarity for the railwaymen among both their fellow trade unionists and the broader public. The resultant poster depicted a dignified, if down-at-heel, railwayman surrounded by his family of four children, wife, and dependent grandmother. The poster's tagline asked, “Is this man an anarchist?”—a reference to Lloyd George's characterization of the railway strike as an “anarchist conspiracy.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The accompanying text outlined the arguments in the railwaymen's favor; yet it was the image that made the case much more effectively than any words could have done. Labour's bid to gain exposure in the popular press in the immediate postwar period was further evidenced during the 1922 London County Council elections when the London Labour Party (LLP) took out display advertisements in the evening press.Footnote ⁴¹ The above examples are illustrative both of a willingness to make use of the mass media in party and trade union propaganda and of the Labour leadership's determination, from an early point in the party's history, to address its political and industrial appeals to a wide cross-class audience and not solely to mobilize its existing working-class constituencies.Footnote ⁴² The leader of the LLP, Herbert Morrison, strongly believed that “the political problem of the middle classes [was] of real importance, demanding careful attention” and that a successful Labour appeal could not be limited to the employment of continental Socialist rhetoric or the language of class solidarity, which “may be unintelligible or repugnant to [a non-working-class audience].”Footnote ⁴³ Such an appeal would have to address the disparate sectors of the electorate not with Socialist “jargon” but by using “the English that people outside the movement understand,” and it would have to take advantage of the media through which people outside the movement took their news and formed their views.Footnote ⁴⁴

While Labour's media policy in the Edwardian and early postwar period was dominated by a pragmatic approach to political communication, the years after the First World War witnessed a growing hostility toward the popular press within the British Left, which would ultimately lead the party away from its earlier policy of engagement with this new mass media. After the First World War, a body of literature emerged that argued that the very nature of the capitalist ownership of the press dictated that it must necessarily work against working-class interests and against the interests of political progressives. Two of the first serious considerations of press bias came from the American Upton Sinclair and the Roman Catholic cultural conservative writer Hilaire Belloc. In 1919, Sinclair published ^{The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism}, arguing that the conservative bias of the popular press was a direct result of its ownership by capitalist interests: “A capitalist newspaper,” he asserted, “lives by the capitalist system, it fights for that system, and in the nature of the case cannot do otherwise. … To expect justice and truth-telling of a capitalist newspaper is to expect asceticism at a cannibal feast.” With equal vividness, he denounced the influence that commercial advertisers had over press content, writing of the “extent to which the bait used in the game of journalistic angling is selected and treated by the business fisherman.” “Not merely is there general control of the spirit and tone of the paper; there is control in minute details, sometimes grotesque.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The year before, Belloc, who wrote frequently for the British Socialist press, put forth a similar argument in his work The Free Press. Belloc emphasized the general congruence of interest between press proprietor and advertiser, whom he characterized as being “of the same kind and breed.”Footnote ⁴⁶ While these authors focused on the role of press proprietors and advertisers in determining press content, another American, Walter Lippmann, argued that the imperative of newspaper proprietors to explain the world in simple, easy-to-digest stereotypes would lead to their adopting a conservative slant, as it was easier to pander to conventional wisdom than to convince readers of the merits of a complex issue. Thus it was the readers’ own prejudices, combined with a commercial imperative to sell papers, that led to the conservatism of the popular press.Footnote ⁴⁷

Lippmann's most influential admirer in Britain was Norman Angell, who was, in turn, one of the most important influences on Labour's press policy in the 1920s. Angell, like many writers of the interwar Left, began his career as a commercial journalist, working as managing editor of the Paris-based ^{Continental Daily Mail} from 1905 to 1912, when he wrote his famous critique of the Edwardian arms race, The Grand Illusion. His opposition to the war pushed him further to the political Left, and his work in launching the Union for Democratic Control in 1915 was the beginning of a long relationship between Angell, Ramsay MacDonald, and the Labour Party. In 1922, Angell published a scathing analysis of the press, which was largely influenced by his observations of press coverage of the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Angell begins The Press and the Organisation of Society with an assertion of the mass press's near omnipotent power over public opinion, and he then goes on to condemn these papers as “perhaps the worst of all menaces to modern democracy … the main instrument by which any real movement towards a new social order is resisted.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While he believed that the direct stake of the proprietors of the commercial press in the capitalist system meant that they were unlikely to use their columns to champion social reform, Angell essentially endorsed Lippmann's view that it was commercial imperatives that created a conservative bias within the popular press, as “it is both safer and more profitable to encourage the public in the falsehood with which it is familiar than to tell it the necessary but unpleasant truth that it does not like to hear.”Footnote ⁴⁹

After Angell, the most serious left-wing critic of the popular press in Britain was the academic and journalist Kingsley Martin. Martin's first book, ^{The Triumph of Lord Palmerston}, had documented the foreign office's manipulation of the Victorian press to create a public opinion in favor of the Crimean War.Footnote ⁵⁰ Four years later, he returned his attention to the manipulation of public opinion in The British Public and the General Strike. This time, however, he focused not on history but on present society. In the 1920s, he argued, it was capitalists, not civil servants, who were perverting the public mind: “The real education of the masses to-day is the Press, which … is completely unscrupulous in misrepresenting the Socialist case, in inventing scares to influence a timid electorate, and in using every device known to the skilled propagandist for keeping the worker ignorant, amused and docile. … Capitalists have all become democrats since the discovery that, in the twentieth century, it is, after all, possible to fool almost all the people all the time.”Footnote ⁵¹ Like Sinclair and Belloc, Martin believed that newspapers’ content was dictated primarily by political prerogatives and only secondarily by economic imperatives.

The views of all five authors were widely debated within the Labour movement in the 1920s. The party activists’ journal, ^{Labour Organiser}, discussed the influence of advertising interests over press policy. In a review of Angell's book for Labour Magazine, Gerald Gould took issue with Angell's conclusion that the press was conservative because it was itself a capitalist interest; he argued that capitalists sponsored newspapers as investments in propaganda, which was why a proprietor could “go on losing gigantic sums every year and yet counting his business a success.” In the same issue, the secretary of the National Union of Journalists endorsed Gould's view. Herbert Tracey, head of the Labour Party Press and Publicity Department, supported Angell's analyses and further honed in on the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a small number of press barons.Footnote ⁵² The 1923 ILP pamphlet “The Capitalist Press: Who Owns It and Why,” which attempted to illustrate the extent to which the popular press was effectively a “capitalist newspaper monopoly,” underscored this theme.Footnote ⁵³ The emphasis on the “trustification” of the popular press, or its consolidation in the hands of a very few proprietors, all of whom were anti-Socialist by both economic imperative and ideological conviction, remained a central theme of Left criticism throughout the interwar period.Footnote ⁵⁴

Not only was it hopeless to believe that the “capitalist press” could serve the interests of the Labour movement; it was also morally wrong to win voters through superficial appeals and cheap propaganda. In 1919, Ernest Bevin, who would sit on the board of the Trades Union Congress (TUC)–owned newspaper ^{Daily Herald} throughout the 1920s and 1930s, expounded his philosophy of Labour journalism: “‘Headline’ propaganda may be a good financial proposition but it does not deal with the real facts of life. … Labour's press must be a real educational factor, provoking thought and stimulating ideas. In addition it must not be full of the caprices of princes, the lubricities of courts and the sensationalism produced by display of the sordid. All these things are but passing phases and are the products of an evil system which is rotten at the base.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The paper's editors shared Bevin's views, with the result that there was little fashion or frivolity to leaven the heavy dose of politics and propaganda in the paper's columns. As Huw Richards has noted, “such phenomena as the four-column page two headline ‘Sugar Subsidy Bill—3rd reading’ … can have done little to encourage any wavering Daily News readers to switch allegiance.”Footnote ⁵⁶ When it was suggested to the paper's editor that he run more human interest stories, he cuttingly replied: “It is clear to me that the lament over the absence of ‘human stories’ simply means that we ought to have given the Russell divorce case as other papers gave it. I myself am persuaded that we gained far more than we lost over that.”Footnote ⁵⁷ While the paper may have gained the moral high ground, its editorial policy did little to gain it readership, and the Daily Herald remained on the perpetual brink of bankruptcy, even after it was officially taken over by the Labour movement in 1922.Footnote ⁵⁸

In addition to an educational ethos in its news columns, the moralists who dominated the ^Herald board in the 1920s abjured all of the frivolities and amusements that made the popular journalism of the interwar period popular. In the 1920s, leading dailies began offering readers indemnities against death or injury in fires, train wrecks, and other spectacular accidents. These newspaper insurance schemes inspired loyalty, and the papers’ payouts for accidents became news items in themselves. A typical full-page promotion in the Daily Mail announced that readers could receive “£250 if killed while a pedestrian by any moving vehicle in the street, or while riding a bicycle, tricycle, or motorcycle for pleasure. Man and wife £500.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The Herald's annual Directors’ Reports from the mid-twenties illustrate the perceived importance of insurance to the fate of the paper. Yet the Daily Herald's chairman rejected a proposal for a Herald insurance scheme on the grounds that insurance giveaways were “an exceedingly doubtful method of trying to get their rank and file to take the paper, which ought first of all—should he not say first and last—to be taken because it was the finest weapon that the workers could hope for in giving publicity to its own principles and ideals.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The paper's editor's attitude toward would-be readers put off by the Herald's lack of an insurance scheme was typical: “The Herald cannot offer you insurances against tumbling off the top of an omnibus or falling down in front of a motor lorry: if you feel inclined to do these things, you must take in some other paper.”Footnote ⁶¹

Even such seemingly innocuous commercial innovations as the publication of a picture page were initially resisted. When the ^Herald finally introduced a picture page in February 1926, C. T. Cramp, on behalf of the paper's directors, reported to the 1927 Party Conference that “a very large number of people were buying the Daily Herald, now that it contained pictures, who did not buy it before. It might be blameworthy that they should need to be attracted by pictures, but they had to take human nature into account.”Footnote ⁶²

The paper did at least consent to run a special women's section, “Home Rulings,” of which Rebecca West was briefly editor. However, the page, unlike its commercial rivals, was much more concerned with housework than with conspicuous consumption, and, as Adrian Bingham has noted, it “occasionally sought to distinguish itself from its competitors … by including socialist analysis of the housewife's position.”Footnote ⁶³ The page was little more than a perfunctory nod to the female readership, and it is hard to imagine an overworked mother, let alone a young “modern girl,” eagerly reaching across the breakfast table for the Home Rulings page.

Critics of the paper, such as the ILP journalist and ^Herald board member Clifford Allen, argued that “the general reader … does not want ‘doing good’ but wants a bright general newspaper.”Footnote ⁶⁴ However, in the intellectual environment of the 1920s Labour movement, such views found little support. Moral and intellectual critiques of the “capitalist press” were further bolstered by those newspapers’ increasing hostility toward the Labour movement from 1920 onward. When a disgruntled reader wrote to the industry journal Newspaper World in February 1919 lamenting that “the way in which newspapers, dominated as most of them are by financial speculators, write down and misrepresent the claims of the workers is infamous,” the editor responded: “We have rather been under the impression that lately the so-called ‘capitalistic Press’ had rather gone out of its way to accentuate the claims of Labour to a fair hearing.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Three years later the correspondent's charges of infamy were harder to dispute. The Daily Express called the November 1922 municipal elections, in which Labour lost control of all but four borough councils, a “sweeping victor[y] for … sanity.”Footnote ⁶⁶ On the day of the elections, the Express ran a cartoon by Sidney Strube showing John Bull tearing the false beard off a kind-looking old man labeled “Labour Programme” to reveal his “RED” bowtie underneath.Footnote ⁶⁷ And the Mail warned its readers that “[Labour] threaten every man's house and furniture, and every woman's clothes and jewellery, as was done in Russia. … If the Labour Bolshevists once get control we shall all be irrevocably dragged along the Russian Road to Ruin.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The Mail's and the Express's coverage of the 1922 general election was little different in tone, though the Mail was more strident than the Express. Rothermere's paper ran an election-day leader headlined: “Don’t Forget to Vote Today: Against Socialism.” And, just in case its readers were not frightened off by the prospect of Communist Armageddon, it concluded by reminding them that the Labour Party “stands for dear beer and very little of it.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The turn against Labour in the popular press was arguably the result of genuine anxieties on the part of editors and proprietors about Labour's potentially revolutionary intentions in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Russia, the rise in industrial militancy at home, and the apparent radicalization of the London Labour Party in light of the Poplar rates rebellion.Footnote ⁷⁰ Many members of the respectable middle classes in the early 1920s genuinely feared the impact of Labour. Stephen Koss relates a—potentially apocryphal, but nonetheless telling—story of the proprietor of the Daily Mirror and soon-to-be proprietor of the Mail Lord Rothermere's visit to his ailing brother Lord Northcliffe in 1921. Rothermere arrived at Northcliffe's villa in the South of France driving an old Ford car and “explained that Bolshevism was coming, that they would all be reduced to beggary, that he was trying to get used to it in advance, and had therefore sold his Rolls-Royce, dismissed his valet, and reduced his expenses to the lowest limit.”Footnote ⁷¹ While evidence pointed to specific and potentially short-term explanations for the shifting tone of the major dailies, opponents of the commercial press were able to cite the growing press hostility as evidence that Socialist advance could not be achieved through a capitalist press.

Certain Labour politicians, most notably J. R. Clynes and Ellen Wilkinson, continued to write frequently for the “capitalist” press throughout the 1920s and to encourage the party to make greater use of media such as film in appealing to the electorate.Footnote ⁷² In contrast, more radical Labourites, such as James Maxton, the head of the Clydeside group, made a point of repeatedly turning down lucrative contract offers from the London dailies.Footnote ⁷³ At the 1925 party conference, a resolution was placed on the agenda advocating that “our leaders should refrain from contributing articles to the Capitalist Press, which is avowedly antagonistic to the principles of the Party.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In a debate on a similar resolution the following year, the mover argued that “it was a wrong principle altogether that their leaders should be writing in that way.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In response to those who argued in favor of exploiting the popular press to advance Labour's interest, and in particular those who suggested that the Liberal press might be persuaded to give Labour a fair deal, opponents argued that the Liberal newspapers, no less than their Tory rivals, “were reckless as to what weapons and methods of attack they employed” and did not shrink “from employing Rothermerian tactics against Labour.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The TUC similarly shifted its attitudes toward the press in the early 1920s. The TUC's press and publicity department spent thousands of pounds on leaflet and pamphlet production, advertisements in the trade union press, and the organization of rallies in conjunction with the “Mines for the Nation” publicity campaign in 1920–21.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet it declined to advertise the miners’ cause in the popular press as the NUR had done during the 1919 railway strike, even though the mine owners relied heavily on press advertising to persuade the public of the arguments against reform.Footnote ⁷⁸ Whether because they believed that the popular press was a corrupting influence on politics or because they had lost faith in the press's willingness to give Labour a fair run, the TUC essentially turned its back on popular journalism in the mid-1920s—an attitude underscored by its conduct of the General Strike in May 1926.

In planning the general strike, the trade union leaders took the controversial decision to call out the printing operatives along with the transport and fuel workers in the first wave of strikers on 4 May 1926. The decision reflected the desire of those most hostile to the “capitalist” press to inflict their revenge on Fleet Street and the anti-Socialist middle classes. According to a member of the TUC research department, “the main arguments in favour of the complete stoppage of the Press are that the anti-labour parties are deprived of their biggest medium of publicity and therefore of propaganda, and that the psychological effect on the `bourgeois' classes is more immediate and more striking than that of almost any other stoppage.”Footnote ⁷⁹ But depriving the enemy of their weapons to use against you should logically be accompanied by hitting them hard with your own weapons, and the strike committee was slow to recognize the importance of putting out their own alternative news and propaganda. At least in the case of the TUC strike committee, negative action against the commercial press seems to have been accorded a higher priority than the dissemination of pro-Labour publicity.

As a result, Labour was at a distinct disadvantage in communicating its aims and intentions to the general public during the strike. The government made effective use of the BBC and disseminated its own antiunion propaganda through the publication of the strike paper, the ^{British Gazette}, and several anti-Labour papers successfully published strike editions with blackleg labor or printed their publications abroad. In contrast, the TUC did not commit to printing its own strike bulletin until the first evening of the strike, and the circulation of the TUC's British Worker was nominal compared to that of the anti-Labour press. (The Worker was also a much duller publication, which, unlike the Mail and the British Gazette, refused to publish any such “frivolous” news as county cricket scores.)Footnote ⁸⁰ The strikers were at an even greater disadvantage, from the point of view of publicity, as the General Council decided early on to boycott the BBC during the strike. The General Council's logic was that, “if the BBC were once given authority to speak in the name of the TUC, … the Publicity committee would have no guarantee that at a possibly critical stage of the stoppage statements might be made by wireless in the Council's name to sabotage the stoppage at the instigation of the government.”Footnote ⁸¹ The decision, while not without its logic, reflects the extent of Labour's suspicions both of the government and of the BBC in this period. For many who remained far from the center of the strike action, the press and the radio were their most important sources of news on the conflict, and the government's near monopoly of these media distorted public perceptions of Labour's cause. The party and trade union leadership were not slow to recognize the damage done by the press and radio boycott.

The events of the general strike brought the issue of the movement's media policy into the open and encouraged critics to challenge the anti–mass culture consensus within the party and TUC leadership. According to one sympathetic journalist: “When we consider this story it becomes, I think, clear that the TUC made a tactical error in calling out the printers. … They needed as much middle-class support as they could get. But it was impossible to build up a favourable public opinion upon a single Labour paper. It is probable that they would have gained a fair measure of publicity in all the Liberal papers if these had appeared. Moreover, even the most hostile papers might have felt it good business to give the strikers’ case prominence.”Footnote ⁸² Another Labour publisher argued: “We gravely underestimate, now and always, the extent to which, by alert and confident publicity, we could win a hearing in the rest of the Press. … With all our faith in democracy, we take singularly little trouble to perfect our technique of persuasion. The Labour Government ignored the Press: most of the Unions do the same.”Footnote ⁸³ In the view of the ILP New Leader, “the shutting down of the Press gave some small excuse for the Government's charge that the strike was, in fact, political.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Ernest Bevin subsequently conceded that it had been a “mistake” to call out the printers “since the absence of newspapers hit the trade unions more than the government which was able to rely on the BBC.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Even the TUC ultimately came to accept the situation: “The movement could never hope to obviate the advantage the other side possesses in its wealth and its ownership of … a score of important newspapers having an aggregate circulation of many millions through such negative methods as a printers’ strike.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The lessons of 1926 led to a shift in Labour's media policy from hostility and obstruction to strategic engagement and cooperation. In the decade and a half after what seemed a stunning setback for traditional industrial action, even the more radical elements of the party and industrial leadership came around to the conclusion that Labour must succeed not as a working-class vanguard but instead as the representative of the Center Left of the British nation, to whom and with whom it must learn to communicate successfully.Footnote ⁸⁷ This shift reflected a growing recognition that the new mass media was a necessary component of Labour's campaign to broaden its appeal and convert a wider audience to Socialism beyond the working class. Since the publication of Ross McKibbin's influential essay “Class and Conventional Wisdom” in 1990, much has been written of the Conservative Party's electoral strategy in the 1920s, which sought to depict Conservatism as representative of “the nation,” specifically the English nation, and Labour as self-interested and foreign in influence and outlook.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, such studies have tended to focus on Conservative appeals without any attention to competing Labour discourses. The interwar Labour Party actively sought to turn the rhetorical tables on the Conservatives and to make the rhetoric of the nation its own.Footnote ⁸⁹ As David Howell has shown, the Labour Party in the 1920s expanded its political organization to encompass groups such as women workers and middle-class intellectuals.Footnote ⁹⁰ But Labour's expansive political strategy was as much rhetorical as organizational. Although it failed to exploit successfully the changes in media technology and culture that occurred in the 1920s, the party still strove to “create a cross-class electoral appeal.”Footnote ⁹¹ Party literature was targeted to nonmanual workers and included matter such as this: “The Financial Policy of the Liberal and Conservative Parties Is a MENACE to Labour Professional and Manual,” “Why Country Women Should Vote Labour,” “To the Women in the Home,” “A Call to Christians,” and “A Burden on the Rates”—the last of which was a direct appeal to the financial interests of the middle-class voter.Footnote ⁹² And while Labour leaders and activists abjured engagement with the commercial media in the 1920s, they did attempt to appeal to voters through the use of posters and the promotion of choirs, brass bands, whist drives, and “Irish Sweeps.”Footnote ⁹³ They even briefly considered flogging Socialism to potential voters through the promotion of Daily Herald cigarettes or the free distribution of Labour Party election soap—the latter being an idea suggested to the party by the German SDP, which distributed over half a million pieces of soap during the 1928 election campaign.Footnote ⁹⁴ Labour's failure to win over a broader section of the electorate in the decade after the war was not for lack of trying. Yet, Labour's success outside of traditional working-class strongholds remained limited before 1929.Footnote ⁹⁵ This failure forced the party to reconsider its communications strategy and ultimately led it to embrace the use of mediated propaganda.

At the annual party conference in 1926, in a debate over Labour contributions to the popular press, a delegate countered the usual condemnation of such activity with the argument that, “if their leaders did not take advantage of the opportunity, the Movement would lose a good deal of publicity.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The following year, the railway president, C. T. Cramp, a longtime critic of the “capitalist press,” conceded that: “Everyone knew that to preach to the unconverted was the best propaganda work. The articles which appeared [in the “capitalist” press] were rather elementary so far as their own people were concerned. … But to the man who merely got, say, his Sunday newspaper, they were valuable information and performed a valuable service to the interests of Labour.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Whereas in the 1920s the editor of ^{Labour Organiser} had dismissed the importance of cultivating the commercial press, claiming that “personally, I think a quarter of an hour of my time in one day for this purpose is rather a trifle too much,” by the mid-1930s the journal was advocating that election agents “set aside a definite hour each day for press communications” and that they take steps not to antagonize national press correspondents.Footnote ⁹⁸ A Labour Party guide to the Conduct of Parliamentary Elections went so far as to remind party agents: “Welcome all the Pressmen … and give them proper attention. Don’t blame the reporter for the bias of his paper, and don’t be too sensitive about alleged ‘distorted’ reports. Remember that what appears unfair to Labour people may not be at all unfair as tested by the canons of even a generous opponent. In any case, even opposition advertises Labour.”Footnote ⁹⁹

In an attempt to better “advertise labour,” the press offices of the General Council and the National Executive increased their efforts to liaise with the editors and journalists of the mass circulation press in the late-1920s and 1930s. Shortly after its establishment in 1917, the party's publicity department had grown to include a lobby correspondent, the party secretary's son Will Henderson.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In 1920, Tracey left the Labour press office to head the new TUC press department, and Henderson took direction of Labour's publicity operation. The TUC and Labour organizations merged in 1923 but split again in the autumn of 1926, with the former remaining under Tracey's control and the latter headed up by Henderson. Both expanded rapidly over the following years, taking on board specialists such as Michael Higgins, the party's “technical expert” on publicity and layout.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By 1934, the TUC's press department was able to report: “Contact with newspapers, especially the Industrial Correspondents and specialized writers on Trade Union and Labour politics, is now a matter of routine … , and those relations have continued during the year with a mutual appreciation of their usefulness.”Footnote ¹⁰²

The increased frequency of Labour contributions to the “capitalist” press in the 1930s was both a cause and a consequence of the improved coverage of Labour issues in these journals. Would-be Labour journalists became more willing to contribute articles to the popular press as it became increasingly clear that Sinclair's, Martin's, and others’ fears of insurmountable press bias were potentially exaggerated. In turn, the proliferation of Labour voices in the columns of these papers served to soften their anti-Socialist tone. The other factor that contributed to the more balanced treatment of Labour news in the national press was the relaunch of the movement-owned paper the ^{Daily Herald} as a commercially operated, left-wing rival to the Tory and Liberal popular dailies. The year after the strike, the Herald board produced a report that advocated the adoption of “a Daily Herald insurance scheme which, while not as pretentious as the schemes of our competitors, would offer genuine benefits to readers.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Two years later, the Herald's vice chairman, Ernest Bevin, led a campaign to relaunch the paper as a commercial daily that could compete for circulation directly with the Conservative and Liberal papers.

By 1928, Bevin at least had decided that the only way to secure a large and politically influential circulation for the ^Herald was to make Labour's paper as commercially attractive as that of its rivals. The transport leader's shift is significant, as he had long held, and continued to hold, a deep-rooted suspicion of “sensationalist” journalism. However, by 1928 not only Bevin but the majority of the TUC general council and the Labour Party executive had come to accept the need for accommodation with this new media. Tellingly, the railway leader and former cabinet minister Jimmy Thomas ended a debate on the future of the Herald at the 1928 TUC Congress by stating that the time had come for change: “There will be a scheme brought to you, a big scheme, a scheme that you have never before considered, a scheme that I repeat is going to be a capitalist scheme, because you cannot run the Herald on sentiment.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The message was clear: moral scruples would no longer prevent the commercialization of the paper. Congress gave its support to the board's proposals, and the following year Bevin arranged for the sale of 51 percent of the paper's shares to a commercial publisher, who duly relaunched the paper on 17 March 1930, complete with a large-scale insurance scheme and a Manchester plant for the printing of a northern edition.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The new publisher triumphantly advertised the paper's relaunch in the columns of its rival dailies. Giant display ads appeared in the Mail, the Express, the Chronicle, and the News announcing the arrival of “Labour's great national newspaper … The new Daily Herald £10,000 free insurance.”

The new ^{Daily Herald} was not, however, merely a left-wing mimic of its Conservative competition. A July 1938 survey conducted by the paper found that the Herald ran, on average, eight times the political and industrial coverage of the Daily Express and more than three times that of the more middle-brow News Chronicle.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While insurance schemes and fashion photography were utilized to lure readers to the Herald, the paper still sought to act as a forum of political education. Notably, in December 1942, the paper published a 3d. supplementary guide to the contents of the Beveridge Report.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Further, the paper served as a check on the excesses of the anti-Socialist press, as rival journals feared losing circulation to the Herald if they were perceived to be too virulently partisan in their coverage of industrial and political news.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Such distinctions were not, however, appreciated by everyone, and many Socialists condemned the crass commercialism of the new paper. Shortly before the paper achieved its circulation of 2 million in 1933, the Tottenham plumbers’ union wrote to their local trades council asking them to “submit a resolution to the General Council urging them to sell their interest in the present ^{Daily Herald} and to start a new paper on the basis of the old Daily Herald.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ One Labour activist bemoaned the fact that “the prestige of the Daily Herald has dwindled amongst the party membership chiefly because it has ceased to be a political organ and become a popular newspaper.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Another wrote that, while “I am aware that for business reasons it is not at present desirable to emphasize the Trade Union and Labour connection of the paper[,] … I think there is room for much more discussion of economic and industrial matter.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The Daily Express gleefully exploited the discomfiture of its rival, publishing a leading article in 1932 that admonished workers “not [to] allow yourselves in any circumstances to be placed under the guidance of capitalist newspapers which call themselves Socialist journals. … The entire daily Press of this country is under capitalist direction. There is no exception to this.”Footnote ¹¹²

The ^Herald's directors, however, were unfazed. They had determined that it was necessary to compete with the capitalist press on its own terms in order to gain circulation and influence. A member of the Herald board made this view clear to the TUC secretary Walter Citrine in 1934: “If every objector and crank had their way, the Herald would soon be published as a blank sheet. I personally strongly object to the Herald being used as a medium for gambling and betting tips, but I know that it is common to the daily press of the country and that it has been demonstrated that you cannot maintain a circulation without it.”Footnote ¹¹³ In 1932, the Labour Organiser wrote in response to yet another letter of complaint about the commercialism of the Herald: “O fie! Don’t you realize you cannot have all the paper for Socialism? The new readers are not all Socialists, are they? And we suppose the Daily Herald knows what pleases the people. So don’t complain. … Let us understand clearly that a newspaper is a newspaper and a propaganda sheet is a propaganda sheet. The one sells and the other doesn’t. … Take our tip. Don’t cry for the moon. Don’t pine because the Daily Herald isn’t the holy bible of Socialism.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Anxieties about the corrupting influence of commercial culture and intense suspicions of the capitalist-controlled press continued to plague Labour leaders, but by the 1930s these anxieties had been overwhelmed by practical considerations of the value of mediated communication.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Whereas tirades against mass culture had once been a standard element of Labour stump speeches, such criticisms were now more likely to be heard in Cambridge courts than in local Labour halls.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Although the post-1931 Labour leadership rejected much of the style and content of MacDonald's politics, they continued to embrace MacDonald's strategy of national political discourse. Philip Williamson has emphasized that, during the 1931 crisis, “the point is not just that each party, institution, group or individual had their own view of the national interest, but that each presumed an identity between their own higher interests and those of the nation.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The same point holds true throughout the interwar period. While the rump Labour Party failed to convince electors in 1931 that its interests were coincident with the national interest, its leaders did not take the lesson from this that Labour should abandon its national strategy and revert to a dependence on its unionized industrial base.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In terms of political rhetoric and strategy, at least, 1931 was not the major turning point in Labour policy. The leadership in the 1930s fully accepted the need to reach out to a national audience and the correlate that “propaganda services have to be kept efficient and up-to-date, and the Party must be ready to adopt modern instruments and to make use of new methods”—a philosophy that extended not only to new techniques in print journalism but to new approaches toward the mass media more generally.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The results of this shift were similarly evident in the party's improved relationship with the BBC after 1926. The Labour leadership came to appreciate broadcasting as a vehicle for bringing its message into homes whose doors were often closed to Labour canvassers and whose breakfast tables remained bereft of the ^{Daily Herald}. Labour also sought to exploit opportunities for film publicity, albeit in a limited capacity. Finally, the party made innovative use of print propaganda in the 1930s to bring its message to a wider audience. Both the London Labour Party and the National Executive employed professional marketing consultants to advise on the production of political posters and literature.Footnote ¹²⁰ They paid special attention to the production of propaganda designed to appeal to the middle classes and to female voters, and sales figures for party literature suggest the success of these endeavors.Footnote ¹²¹

There is evidence to suggest that Labour's embrace of new techniques of mass communication played an important role in the transformation of the party from a sectional interest group to the second party of the state in the interwar period. Given that the party's share of the national vote continued to climb at every election between 1918 and 1929, even while the press was denouncing the party as “Labour Bolshevists” and the BBC was declaring the general strike to be an assault on the constitution, the impact of the mass media on interwar public opinion about politics may initially appear questionable. Koss, for one, has cited Labour's progress in the 1920s as evidence of the declining power of the press in twentieth-century British politics.Footnote ¹²² Yet we should not be too quick either to accept the argument that Labour advanced consistently in the 1920s without support from the mass media or the implication that the importance of the media in modern politics has been overstated. Duncan Tanner has argued that Labour's political growth between 1918 and 1923 has been exaggerated and that the party's national breakthrough truly came in 1929, when it captured nearly seventy-five parliamentary seats for the first time, many of them outside of its traditional industrial and inner-city base.Footnote ¹²³ Sam Davies and Bob Morley's recent studies of local elections in England and Wales reveal that the party actually suffered wide-scale setbacks at the local level in the early 1920s and only witnessed sustained growth in the last years of the decade.Footnote ¹²⁴ While it would overstate the media's role to suggest that these shifts in support were directly attributable to Labour's changing relationship with the mass media, it is noteworthy that the party's 1929 breakthrough coincided with the shift toward a policy of engagement with, and exploitation of, the popular press and other new media.

The impact of Labour's media strategy in sustaining and rebuilding the party's political support post-1931 also merits further investigation. While historians have pointed to opinion polling and by-election data to underscore the limits of Labour's post-1931 revival and have suggested that the “swing to the left” in British public opinion that paved the way for Labour's 1945 victory did not take place until 1942,Footnote ¹²⁵ more recent studies of local elections and changing patterns of party membership in the 1930s suggest a different picture.Footnote ¹²⁶ Further, an analysis of contemporary political opinion indicates that politicians in the 1930s believed Labour's position to be stronger than retrospective psephological analyses suggest.Footnote ¹²⁷ These studies highlight the limits to previous generalizations about the stagnation of Labour support in the 1930s. And it is arguable that even such evidence understates the extent of the party's revival. Voting patterns can be misleading, particularly in gauging attitudes about political parties. It is impossible to discern whether an elector who voted for the National candidate in 1935 did so because he or she positively supported the government or because he or she believed that Labour was incompetent and unsuitable for office. Given that a key aim of Labour's publicity strategy throughout the interwar period—and in particular after 1931—was to convince voters of the party's constitutionality and respectability, this distinction is important. Data from the party's publicity department on sales of Labour literature, BBC listener research data, and Daily Herald circulation reports all suggest that growing numbers of voters were willing to give Labour's case consideration.Footnote ¹²⁸ Even if the majority of electors remained unwilling to vote Labour, few apparently continued to view the party as outside the constitutional pale. This transformation of public perceptions of the party in the 1930s is crucial for understanding public support for Labour's entry into the coalition government in 1940 and the party's election victory in 1945.

Labour's embrace of popular journalism and other mass media is not only significant for its immediate impact on public opinion of the party. Arguably, its greatest significance lies in its implications for the party's long-term development as the principal representative of the left wing of the British nation. In order successfully to speak for and to a national public, the interwar Labour Party had to reach outside its “natural” constituencies of trade union halls and Socialist societies and connect with a broader audience. While the party did not abandon traditional methods of party propaganda, Labour's leaders reached the conclusion that such methods would have to be supplemented by new forms of political communication designed to connect with an audience that might be immune to straight-forward propaganda but could be persuaded to read a pro-Labour article in their daily newspaper if it occurred opposite the racing tips column or an article on bias-cut hem lines. To some, this was a mere sacrifice of principle to expediency. In 1937, the future party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, excused his support for importing commercial techniques into Labour politics by noting that “education and winning voters were not necessarily compatible” and that the new techniques of political advertising, however bereft of educational value, at least had the benefit of success.Footnote ¹²⁹ Others, however, believed that, if used correctly, the popular press could serve as a valuable tool of political education. Herbert Morrison and other advocates of mediated politics justified their position on the grounds that propaganda and political education were not necessarily incompatible.Footnote ¹³⁰ Rather than rejecting the goal of “making Socialists” for the more cynical project of “selling Socialism,” the Labour Party was using the techniques of salesmanship to make political education more palatable.

In the decades that followed, the balance between political pragmatism and more utopian idealism would be constantly debated, and Labour's relationship with the mass media would be subject to repeated renegotiation. One recent study of Left political culture in the 1950s has suggested that Labour's electoral difficulties in this period stemmed from both a congenital aversion to commercial culture and a political alienation from the mass media, which left them ill-equipped to adapt to changes in the social and political climate in the postwar era.Footnote ¹³¹ But it is important to remember that, while many men and women in the interwar period argued that Labour should not engage with the commercial media, it was not these voices that ultimately prevailed. While anticommercialism formed an important aspect of the political culture of the Left throughout the twentieth century, both in Britain and elsewhere, it was only one component of a heterogeneous culture in which a willingness to adapt and to innovate also played a crucial and frequently determinant role. Peter Mandelson recently paid homage to this tradition in Labour politics in his foreword to the new edition of Bernard Donoghue and G. W. Jones's biography of his grandfather, Herbert Morrison. Mandelson praised Morrison's determination that “Labour should have a broad appeal across the social classes” and his “adept use of the media to project himself and his political vision.”Footnote ¹³² While the comparative weight of education and manipulation in New Labour's media policy is debatable, the current party has arguably only revived a long tradition within Labour politics of exploiting the mass media to project its political vision to the nation.