Surveys show a lack of trust in political actors and institutions across much of the democratic world. Populist politicians and parties attempt to capitalise on this political disaffection. Commentators worry about our current 'age of anti-politics'. Focusing on the United Kingdom, using responses to public opinion surveys alongside diaries and letters collected by Mass Observation, this book takes a long view of anti-politics going back to the 1940s. This historical perspective reveals how anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity over the last half-century. Such growth is explained by citizens' changing images of 'the good politician' and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. Current efforts to reform and improve democracy will benefit greatly from the new evidence and conceptual framework set out in this important study.

The Good Politician: Folk Theories, Political Interaction, and the Rise of Anti-Politics

‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it. Corner's own work on television history has broached such matters, but exceptions like Tim O'Sullivan's exploration through audience research and oral testimony of cultures of televiewing (in everyday life and as civic ritual around national events) in a Corner-edited volume apart, has not induced many others to do so.1 Corner has hit upon a broader debate about the predilections of post-1945 British history that necessarily impacts upon writing about television more than radio, since television only became a mass activity in the mid-1950s. Critics charge that co...

Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control

https://researchsystem.canberra.edu.au/ws/files/9016754/227.pdf

Changing spaces of political encounter and the rise of anti-politics: evidence from Mass Observation's General Election diaries

This thesis will argue that 1945-51 was a seminal period in the development of communication between the Government, the media and the people in Britain. The Attlee Government was the first British Government to fully engage with the dilemma of how a Government communicates with its citizens to sustain a credible democracy. To do this it established the modern machinery of Government communication and used the mass media extensively. Its experience, and in particular the crises it faced during its two terms in office, caused it to shift away from an idealistic vision of helping to develop an informed electorate towards the pragmatic use of information as a means of persuasion and a tool for engineering consent. The period laid the framework, in other words, of modern information management. In order to demonstrate this the thesis will show how the Government's attitudes changed over its period in office, and how its approach towards communication altered. It will start by examining how and why the Government established the machinery of communication in 1945. It will then seek to explain why the Government's relationship with the Press deteriorated so far and so fast, and with what consequences. It will try to demonstrate that there was the genuine possibility of radical reform of the Press and that it is important to understand why this did not happen. The thesis will go on to consider the closeness of the Government-BBC relationship after the war and how that closeness seriously damaged the credibility of the Corporation's monopoly. It will assess the Government's major experiment in film-making and why it found it so difficult to use film as a means of informing the public. And, it will show how the Government ignored, alienated and eventually collaborated with the newsreels. The thesis will end by assessing the distance the Government had travelled in its use of communication.

The development of communication between the government, the media and the people in Britain, 1945-51.

(1997). The Conservative Party's 1997 Party Election Broadcasts in Historical Context. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 459-462.

The Conservative Party's 1997 Party Election Broadcasts in Historical Context

(1995). Television enters British politics: the Conservative Party's Central Office and political broadcasting, 1945–55. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 265-284.

Michael David Kandiah

Papers

Television enters British politics: the Conservative Party's Central Office and political broadcasting, 1945–55

The Conservative Party's 1997 Party Election Broadcasts in Historical Context