Introduction

The relationship between the press and the labour movement can be recognised as one of modern British history's most enduring antagonisms and– like most longstanding conflicts– it is an association that serves to tell us much about the respective antagonists’ essential historical character. Indeed, it would be difficult to project a comprehensive image of either the press or the labour movement during the twentieth century without at least some reference to the symbiotic presence of the other. With that said, relatively little attention has been paid to considering what this relationship, taken as a whole, might suggest to us about the idiosyncrasies of British political culture more generally. As it is, most studies tend be framed from the perspective of either the labour movement or the press, with scholars taking as their remit such perennial concerns as the extent of the press's political influence, the prevalence of partisanship and editorial bias, and the changing forms of popular representation and collective political engagement in an era of expanding mass-communications and mass-democracy. In recent years, a number of more penetrating historical studies focusing on, amongst other things, the ways in which the labour movement sought to negotiate or offset the ‘virulent anti-Labour hostility of the emerging popular press in the inter-war period’; the Labour Party's growing accommodation of media and publicity from the mid-1930s onwards; and the generally faltering attempts on the part of labour activists and intellectuals to furnish an alternative ‘left press’ capable of countering the perceived ‘hegemonic domination’ of Fleet Street, have opened up the possibility of less reductively binary analytical entry points (Thomas 2005; Beers 2010).