This article looks at the ideological role of popular history in British politics and the media. It argues that British politics since 1945 has operated under two key successive meta-narratives about the past that have shaped and reflected the political settlement of the present. It charts briefly how negative images of a free-enterprise, inter-war period played a key role in legitimizing the emergence of a new centre-left political settlement from 1945 onwards. It then explores how this progressive myth gave way from 1979 onwards to a right-wing myth of the 1970s. It details how right-wing politicians and the media between 1979 and 1992 promoted a negative popular history of the 1970s that legitimized the rightward shift in British politics and discredited social democratic alternatives. And it ends by examining the consequences of New Labour’s collusion with this right-wing memory as a means to define its own identity.
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