The Transformation of British Public Politics After the First World War*

Abstract

The years immediately after the First World War witnessed a dramatic shift in the meanings attached to the political meeting — and hence to its place in British political culture. Victorian and Edwardian customs that had legitimized an active, assertive popular presence in public politics fell rapidly into disrepute after 1918. It was not that political meetings suddenly became stately exercises in rational debate — into the 1930s there were still explosive demonstrations of old-style popular feeling — but from the early 1920s British politicians, Labour no less than Liberal or Conservative, consciously sought to remould popular involvement in the political process by denigrating assertive and irreverent demonstrations of popular feeling and championing an alternative vision of the public as peaceable, rational and above all unassertive. In short, they sought to refashion public politics — taming the exuberance of the pre-war era as part of a bold, and ultimately successful,...

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