Welcome back to our Document of the Month feature, showcasing some of the awesome documents in our collections.

With another general election looming and Labour putting forward ideas not heard in a very long while, we thought it prudent to go back to what is these days often presented as Labour's Golden Age, the Attlee government of 1945-51, presiding over the birth of the NHS, nationalisations etc. However, this was also the government who amongst many other things started to build up the very same "nuclear deterrent" the party now agonises about. This is one of many points brought up against Attlee's government in the lovely little pamphlet How Labour Governed: 1945-1951, originally published in the 1950s by the Syndicalist Workers' Federation (this edition was probably reprinted at some point in the 1960s).

Myths of a past Golden Age have often been conjured up to rally people to resist the status quo, and sadly many modern activists make mistakes not all too disimilar to e.g. authors associated with the Leveller movement of the mid seventeenth century, harking back to a golden age which never existed rather than working to build a new world.