Baggage of Empire: Reporting Politics and Industry in the Shadow of Imperial Decline

(Paperback)

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Martin Adeney's generation was the last to be born while the British Empire still existed. They were 'twilight's children', and, like those generations that followed, shaped by its consequences. Born in the British Middle East as the Empire tottered, Adeney would go on to report on the grand events of the post-Imperial age, for The Guardian, as Industrial Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, and then as the BBC's Industrial Editor. His career gave him a unique vantage point from which to observe the decline of the great industries and imperial trade cities; the retreat of the newspaper empires from the north to an almost exclusively metropolitan viewpoint; the rise and fall of the trades unions, which dominated politics from the end of the 1960s to the mid-1980s, and the rise of Thatcherism and big business. This compelling blend of memoir and narrative history describes how many of the issues that preoccupied us in the late '60s and early '70s - including immigration, housing, social provision, education, industry and communications - remain the daily currency of our political discourse.It shows how, for all the material prosperity we enjoy and for all our cultural self-confidence, we nonetheless nurture a lingering feeling of superiority alongside a perception that things were better in the past, when we, the British, were taken seriously.It is Adeney's contention that we are all still carrying the baggage of empire.

Reviews

"Martin Adeney has been a fine industrial journalist more or less over my whole working life. Here he writes vividly of his contact with contemporary leaders in politics, business and trade unions who, in various ways, battled against Britain's decline as a great manufacturing nation. It is an entertaining elegy for a world that has largely disappeared along with the British Empire itself." - Lord (John) Monks, former General Secretary of the TUC and the ETUC; "Martin Adeney's memoir is a very well-observed account of the decline of three 'empires' that have defined his life. He writes with clarity and wit about the great events of the second half of the twentieth century, during which he met many notable figures, especially politicians and trade union barons, and his portraits of these people, based on his personal experience of them, are always acute and funny." - Professor Lawrence Goldman, Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Author Bio

Martin Adeney has had a privileged insight into British industry and politics for over forty years on both sides of the media. Reporting for The Guardian in the '60s and '70s, his specialisms included community affairs and industrial relations, and assignments in former imperial possessions in Asia.From 1977 to 1978 he was industrial correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph before joining BBC TV, where he became its first industrial editor. He planned and presented daily news coverage and made films for programmes like Newsnight and The Money Programme over a decade in which industrial relations was at the top of the political agenda.In 1989, he moved to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), then the UK's largest manufacturing company with a worldwide spread of activities. He became vice-president of public affairs before establishing his own consultancy in 2000.His experience is reflected in three books: The Miners' Strike, 1984-85: Loss without Limit (with John Lloyd), The Motor Makers: The Turbulent History of Britain's Car Industry and Nuffield: A Biography, a life of the industrial magnate and charitable benefactor Lord Nuffield.He contributes to The Guardian's obituary columns and the Dictionary of National Biography.