Intergenerational memory, The Labour Party, and The Ghost of the Two Tony’s

This dissertation will examine the Labour Party memberships’ understanding of its own history. By use of an online survey the individual grassroots membership was contacted and asked to give their opinion regarding certain major leaders, figures, internal and external events in the recent history of the party. These results were cross referenced with published studies carried out by Seyd and Whiteley in the 1980s and 90s. The results illustrate that there is a generational split in the collective memory of the party between two groups, basically these two groups are younger and older party generations. This split can be explained by the ‘reminiscence bump’ which is a concept from the world of psychology. Those who identify with a particular ideological section of the party are much more likely to have a different perceptions of the past compared with other sections. As Whiteley has shown, people join the party for either instrumental or expressive reasons and that those two reasons become manifest in different perceptions of the two figures of Tony Blair and Tony Benn. These differing perceptions reinforce the idea that the past is always viewed through the lens of the present. This dissertation offers a framework for historians to use when analysing popular cultural perceptions of history with generational memory at its heart.