Nick Garland

Research Topic

'The Labour Party, the British Left, and the Idea of Community, 1968-1994'

If you are interested in any further information, you can reach me at nicholas.garland@univ.ox.ac.uk

Supervisor: Dr Ben Jackson

My thesis explores the different ways that actors within the British Labour Party and the wider Left, including politicians, journalists, intellectuals and activists, conceptualised and deployed ideas of 'community' - in particular, to criticise statist social democracy - in the last third of the twentieth century. This spans the differing ideological perspectives informing grassroots 'community action' after 1968; the turn of Labour's revisionist right towards 'community socialism', and the role of 'community' in the ideological development of the SDP; the varied politics of 1980s municipal socialism; this period's resurgence of the 'socialist travelogue', offering journalistic accounts of the decline of solidaristic working-class communities; and New Labour's engagement with 'communitarianism'. 

Alongside my DPhil research, I am an adviser to a member of the Labour Party's Shadow Cabinet and a Contributing Editor for Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy. 

Publications

Book chapters:

• 'Social democracy, the decline of community and community politics in postwar Britain', in Nathan Yeowell (ed.), Rethinking Labour's Past, (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

General articles and book reviews:

• Editor, Renewal, 30/2, 2022 (with Emily Robinson).
• ‘Beyond the chaos’, Renewal, 30/2, 2022 (with Emily Robinson).
• 'Looking for a fight', Renewal, 28/3, 2020.
• 'Ideas of England', Renewal, 28/1, 2020.
• 'Rebuilding our institutions: social security for the future', Renewal, 26/3, 2018 (with Rachel Reeves MP).

Conference/Seminar Papers

• 'Orwell and Priestley Revisited: Narrating the Crisis of Working-Class Community in 1980s Britain', Political Studies Association Politics & History Specialist Group conference, 'Your street to Downing Street', October 2020; and at North American Conference of British Studies, November 2020.
• '"What Remains of What We Still Call, Sentimentally, our Communities": Narrating the Crisis of Working-Class Community in 1980s Britain', University of Oxford Modern British History seminar, February 2021.
• 'Imagining the Radical Intelligentsia in Late Twentieth Century Britain', PSA Conference 2021; and UCL Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought, June 2022.