Everyday Politics, Ordinary Lives: A New History of British Democracy, 1918–1992. By AdrianBingham. Oxford University Press, 2025. 336 pp. £30.

In this important book, Adrian Bingham offers a new perspective on Britons' experiences of mass democracy in the twentieth century.Despite the title, the book is largely a study of what citizens thought, wrote, and said about politics, or their 'everyday political thinking', as Bingham calls it, rather than an examination of their activities or political practices.The book builds on the work of historians such as Jon Lawrence, Selina Todd, Rebekah Goldsmith, and political scientists such as Will Jennings, who have shown the value in re-reading Mass Observation (MO) and other social surveys to excavate popular attitudes to politics.The book goes beyond existing studies, however, in its depth of research, using sources including MO, surveys, polls, election studies, oral history collections, Labour and Conservative party papers, and the popular press, the last being a subject on which Bingham is the pre-eminent authority.As Bingham notes, these sources provide 'a rich array of information' that 'is a goldmine for the historian' (p.49).At the same time, it is worth noting that these sources mean that the voice of the people that emerges is one that is mediated through pollsters, social scientists, journalists, party research departments and other interlocutors.Covering a period from the introduction of universal (but not equal) suffrage in 1918 to the emergence of 24-hour news in the early 1990s, the book begins with two chapters that provide the context for the later analysis.The first chapter outlines the source base and offers an excellent overview of related topics, such as the evolution of opinion polling.The second chapter examines the structures and sites of everyday politics, considering the varied spaces for political interactions, including the home, the workplace, school and university, and religious institutions.The remainder of the book proceeds chronologically, charting popular attitudes to politics in four periods and providing significant new perspectives on many long-standing debates within political and social history.Thus, Chapter 3 ('Building Democracy') contributes to the debates seeking to explain the Conservatives astonishing electoral success during the interwar period, and Labour's struggles.The following chapter, 'Rebuilding Democracy', provides new evidence for the growth of support for social reconstruction during the Second World War, which contributed to Labour's landslide victory in 1945, and the later consolidation of class voting into electoral blocs aligned to the two main parties.'Diversifying Democracy' considers the changing dynamics of 'everyday political thinking' in the long 1960s that were associated with social trends like increased racial and cultural diversity, the waning of deference, new forms of youth culture, as well as the rise of Celtic nationalism.The chapter includes an analysis of the contemporary attitudes of Black and Asian Britons towards politics.The final substantive chapter, 'Divided Democracy', charts the political polarization and social unrest of the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.The chapter argues that while Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives achieved electoral success by winning a minority of the vote at general elections, this did not reflect wider political disillusionment with politics.The overall argument of the book is that across the period 'most people … felt remote from politics and sceptical of politicians' (p.293).Yet, in some respects, this conclusion follows from the definition of politics that is employed.What the book documents is popular attitudes to formal politics: Westminster, Whitehall, political parties and electoral politics.The world of civil society, voluntary associationism and non-governmental organizationswhich, as historians such as Helen McCarthy, Matthew Hilton and, before them, Brian