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design of each election but it will also allow me to pose each election contextually alongside the happenings of the time; social, political and otherwise. Alongside getting to grips with each election I’ll also preface this research with a broader exploration into the Poster; it’s historical context and use as a political tool and motif. This will help give me a wider and more holistic view of the topic and give me an interesting contextual framework to analyse the content at the heart of the work. To give a wider understanding of the subject matter it’s important to give context into what and who The Labour Party are. In the United Kingdom, The Party has formed part of the ‘mainstream’ of politics since the realigning election of 1922 in which they consigned the Liberals to ‘Third Party’ status, and all future Governments were commanded by the Labour Party or the Conservatives. The party grew out of the Trade Union movement in the late 19th Century, born out of a recognition of the newly enfranchised workingclass population that Britain had acquired after the enactment of the second parliamentary reform bill in 1867, and widening of suffrage in 18841 and 1 G. A. Philips, The Rise of the Labour a need for representation of these WorkingParty, 1893-1931, Lancaster Pamphlets Class communities in Parliament. Set against (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992), the backdrop of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels' p. 1. ‘The Communist Manifesto’ published in 1848, Engels’ ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ in 1845 and Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ in 1867, leftist political ideology had a real theoretical grounding, and out of these ideas and with the support of the Trade Union movement, the Independent Labour Party & Scottish Labour Party merged to form the Labour Representation Committee, which later became the Labour Party. As the fight for the advancement of the
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Introduction