In 2016 Labour, led by the most left-wing leader that the party had ever seen, burst into new life. The Westminster beltway of political insiders, pollsters, commentators and newspaper proprietors were completely taken by surprise and left with egg all over their faces. Few took the trouble to ask how or why Labour, almost alone amongst parties on the left in Europe, had re-grouped, revived and successfully turned its back, so decisively on Tony Blair and Bill Clinton's 'third way'. Labour England wasn't dead. It had been sleeping. For thirty years it had been kicked into near oblivion, first by Margaret Thatcher and then by Tony Blair. That strange, sentimental, almost mystical mix of the trade unions, adult education institutes, powerful Labour councils, the local comprehensive school and the local Co-Op that sustained Labour governments for thirty years from the 1940s to the 1970s had been in retreat. Now, against all the odds, it was back. What happened? What will Jeremy Corbyn's Labour England look like? Francis Beckett and Mark Seddon are Labour insiders. They know. And they say it will be an exciting and better place to live.

A controversial new investigation in the 1984 Miners strike and how it changed Modern Britain. The Miners' strike was a dividing line in Modern British history. Before 1984, Britain was an industrial nation, reborn from the ashes of the Second World War by Clement Atlee's vision of a welfare state. Most of the great industries were nationalised and the trade unions was one of the major forces in the land. After the strike, which ended with humiliating defeat in March 1985, Thatcher's Britain was born. In March 1984, the leader of the Miners' Union, Arthur Scargill, led his members out of the pits without a ballot to protest at planned pit closures; they would spend the next 13 months facing the utmost deprivations as they fought to keep their jobs. On picket lines the miners faced harassment and the police, which culminated in the violent Battle of Orgreave. Meanwhile Thatcher's government feared that Britain was on the verge of a civil war. It was a struggle of attrition that neither side could dare lose. Twenty five years after the strike, the debate is still controversial. Marching to the Faultline tells the full story of the strike from confidential cabinet meetings at Downing Street to backroom negotiations, and life on the picket line. The book draws on previously unseen sources from interviews with the major figures, private archives and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to set the record straight.