Book Review: Western Europe, Western Europe since the War
| DOI | 10.1177/002070206502000222 |
| Author | Arthur E. Sutherland |
| Date | 01 June 1965 |
| Published date | 01 June 1965 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
BOOK
REviEws
265
THE
BRITISH
LABOUR
PARTY.
A
Short
History.
By
Carl
F.
Brand.
1964.
(Stanford:
Stanford
University
Press.
340pp.
$7.50)
Professor
Brand
has
written
a
useful
short
history
of
the
Labour
Party
from
the
1880s
to
Mr.
Wilson's election
as leader
early
in
1963.
There
may
still
be
Americans
not
beyond
the
call
of
reason
who
remain
to
be
convinced
that
the
Labour
Party
is
not
full
of
Communists,
but
Mr.
Brand's
helpful efforts to
reassure
them
can
have
distracting
effects;
for
instance
he
always
calls
party
members
"Labourites,"
which
conceals
the
not
unimportant
fact
that
almost
all
of
them
think
"Social-
ists"
is
a
synonym
for
"members
of
the Labour
Party"
and "Labourite"
a
synonym
for
a
"Labour
Party
member
who
declares
he
is
not
a
Social-
ist."
The
result
of
Mr.
Brand's
concentration
on records
of
party
con-
ferences,
rather
than
on Commons
debates,
is
curiously
similar:
party
conferences
are
not presidential
conventions,
at
which
a
party
gathers
itself
together
for
an
assault
on
the
enemy
and
so
the
great
moments
of
conference
history
(Lansbury,
German
rearmament,
"we
shall
fight
again")
are
moments
of
internal
strife,
and
often
moments
of
strife
in
which
the
leaders
warn
the
conference
against
fellow-travellers.
And
so
we
get
back
to
Mr.
Brand's
image
of
the
Labour
Party
as
primarily
an
anti-Communist
organization;
the
Communist
Party
and
the
Conser-
vative
Party
take
up
equal
amounts
of
space
in
the
index.
With
these
limitations
the
book
covers
the
ground
quite
adequately.
It
avoids
the
intricacies
of
pre-1914
Labour
politics,
when
the
party
was
unimportant;
Mr.
Brand
might
have
compared
it
with
the
Irish
Nation-
alists
and among
other things
this might
have
suggested
that
most
members
of
the
early Labour
party
never
expected
to
rule
the
country.
MacDonald
is
treated
fairly
but
one of
his
great
contributions
to
the
party-that
he
was
determined
to
see
Labour
rule-appears
to
have
escaped
the author.
The
natural
result
is
that
Henderson
is
praised
a
little
too
generously.
There
are
a
few
other
worrying
points:
the
expan-
sion
of
the
working-class
electorate
in
1918
is
ignored;
Dalton's
assertion
that
his
taxation
policies
after
1945
carried
out
further
redistribution
of
income
is
accepted
a
little
uncritically.
The
trouble
is
that
one-volume
histories
of
the
Labour
party
are
now
so
plentiful
that
it
is
hard
to
do
the
job
very
badly
or
very
well;
a
real
opportunity
for
death
or
glory
would
be
a history
of
the
post-
Disraeli
Conservative
party.
University
of
Toronto
TRE•VOR
LLOYD
Western Europe
WESTERN
EUROPE
SINCE
THE
WAR.
A
Short
Political
History.
By
Jacques
Freymond.
1964.
(New
York:
Frederick
A.
Praeger.
Toronto:
Burns
&
MacEachern,
vii,
236pp.
$6.00)
Professor
Freymond,
historian
and
Director
of
the
Graduate
Insti-
tute
of
International
Studies
at
Geneva,
here
presents a
compact
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