Daisy Payling. Socialist Republic: Remaking the British Left in 1980s Sheffield Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Pp. 248. $130.00 (cloth).

In 2023, a TV reboot of the Full Monty, the 1997 hit film about laid-off steelworkers turned strippers in post-industrial Sheffield, caught up with the characters "seven prime ministers and eight northern regeneration policies later," as they navigate the disastrous consequences of more than a decade of austerity that saw local government budgets contract by some 15bn.The real Sheffield City Council, avoiding the fate of other local authorities forced to declare effective bankruptcy, managed a balanced budget for 2023/24 at the price of 47m worth of cuts.Cut back 40 years to 1983 and Sheffield was in the mid of an experiment in "local socialism," a deliberate effort to resist and mobilize against Thatcherism that saw city council expenditure rise by 83% (23% in real terms), much of it funded from increased local tax levies ("rates").The last council to hold out in the 1985 rebellion of a string of Labour-led authorities against Conservative government measures to forcibly curb "grossly extravagant" spending through rate-capping in councils caricatured as "loony-left," Sheffield has featured in diverse literatures on "local socialism" and the "new urban left" of which the Greater London Council (GLC) is the most famous exemplar.Such experiments are now attracting renewed attention from scholars and activists exploring the possibilities and limitations of contemporary "new municipalisms," "progressive localism," and "rebel cities." Daisy Payling's valuable historical study of the rise and fall of Sheffield's "socialist republic" takes a different but ultimately complementary approach to those focused on activist strategies in broad comparative perspective.Drawing on a wide range of sources including the personal collections of activist "hoarders," interviews with activists and politicians including council leader and later Labour MP David Blunkett, campaign group and council archives, she focuses on the interactions between "different streams of activism and local politics" in a single city whose strong labor tradition and "vibrant history of radicalism" both enabled and limited the novel radicalisms associated with new urban leftism (6, 7).An early chapter shows how in Sheffield (unlike some of the other councils), the experiment with municipal socialism was deeply rooted in local Labour and trade union politics and retained a strong orientation to Labour as a national electoral force.A cohort of "homegrown activist" councilors led by Blunkett sought to reverse a declining Labour vote in the context of rising unemployment and de-industrialization by fostering community action and political education; encapsulated in the title of the 1983 pamphlet "Building from the bottom."Popular practical measures on cheap bus fares, community development and housing were combined, especially as the city's radical reputation "emboldened activists and brought more to the city," with more symbolically leftist ones-Sheffield declared itself a "nuclear free" and demilitarized zone and the Red Flag flew from the Town Hall on