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The article talks about the Working Paper published by the Modern British Studies (MBS) research centre on new ways of thinking about the transformation of British society, culture, politics and economy between 19th century and 2015. It highlights the cultures of democracy and the rising political, social and cultural change. It states that the paper can be used as a study material for understanding the state of history in present times.

This paper explores the historical formation of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the United States and argues that programme emergence depended on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to link the economic concerns of agricultural production with the ideational concern of national security. Using a historical institutionalist framework this paper stresses the critical juncture of the Second World War and the positive feedback loop created between agricultural industries and schools to understand the emergence of the NSLP. In addition, it stresses the role of frames in policy-making and focuses on the use by policy entrepreneurs of a security frame whereby child malnutrition was cast as a national security issue. The policy window of war gave policy entrepreneurs the chance to use the politically and culturally resonant frame of security, in the contexts of agricultural subsidies, to push for the creation of this programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Devolution has become a key 'global trend' over recent decades as many states have decentralised power to sub-state governments. The UK resisted this trend until the late 1990s when devolution was enacted by the then Labour Government, taking a highly asymmetrical form in which different territories have been granted different powers and institutional arrangements. Devolution allows the devolved governments to develop policies that are tailored to the needs of their areas, encouraging policy divergence, although this is countered by pressures to ensure that devolved approaches do not contradict those of the central state, promoting convergence. This review paper aims to assess the unfolding dynamics of devolution and policy divergence in the UK, spanning different policy areas such as economic development, health and social policy. The paper emphasises that devolution has altered the institutional landscape of public policy in the UK, generating some high-profile examples of policy divergence, whilst also providing evidence of policy convergence. In addition, the passage of time underlines the nature of UK devolution as an unfolding process. Its underlying asymmetries have become more pronounced as the tendency towards greater autonomy for Scotland and Wales clashes with a highly centralised mode of policymaking in Westminster, the consequences of which have spilt over into the devolved territories in the context of the post-2007 economic crisis through public expenditure cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates about the design and provision of post-war housing within the papers and report of the Parker Morris committee. It does so to show how the models of citizens' rights and expectations which underpinned post-war welfare provision were transformed by mass affluence and the dynamic sphere of commercial consumption. Parker Morris's deliberations demonstrate that, as early as the 1950s, the citizen-subject was reimagined as a consuming individual, with requirements based on their expressive needs and consuming desires, and that this had far-reaching consequences for social democratic systems of universal welfare provision. The introduction of consumerist imperatives into publicly defined models of citizens' needs enhanced the political and cultural authority of the commercial domain, prompted a heightened role for commercial experts and market logics within public governance, and served to devalue socialized forms of provision in favour of consumer choice in the private market. The article thus engages with the growing scholarship on the politics of mass consumerism by showing how the material and emotional comforts of post-war affluence came to be constructed as critical to social democratic citizenship and selfhood. Situating this uneasy entanglement of social democratic rights with consumer satisfaction as part of a wider trajectory of political change, the piece suggests that Parker Morris marks an early but significant moment in the transition from post-war welfarism and social democracy to the consumer- and market-oriented forms of governance which came to dominate British politics and society in the latter part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of Margaret Thatcher appearing on television dressed in a ‘peacock blue sari’ must seem rather farfetched—and yet, for a brief moment, it appeared a distinct possibility. That such an event seemed plausible reflected the growing recognition among senior Conservatives of the electoral significance of ethnic minority voters. While Conservatives had begun to experiment with measures to appeal to BAME voters as early as 1951, from the mid-1970s formal party structures dedicated to the recruitment and representation of BAME voters began to emerge. In 1976 the Party launched the Anglo Asian Conservative and the National Anglo West Indian Conservative Societies, both of which sought to address poor performance among black and Asian voters. This paper explores the development of Conservative electoral strategies targeting BAME voters in the period after 1951, and reflects on what these strategies reveal about Conservative narratives of the nation in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Irish Brigade in the British service, formed in the 1790s, was composed of Irish Catholic soldiers, who had recently regained official permission to serve in the British armed forces, and Franco-Irish émigré officers. The British government believed that the brigade offered Catholics a ‘fair chance’ to participate in the armed forces, but the reality was quite different. This paper examines the brigade’s origins, difficult formation, and arduous service in the West Indies and Nova Scotia, where it was consigned because of Irish Protestant distrust and political manoeuvring, and explores the changing nature of Irish military identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the 'White Australia policy', minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an 'alien' race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous 'white' settler society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a crucial and formative decade in the life of Vladimir J. (Kaye) Kysilewsky (1896-1976), a Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper editor, lobbyist, university professor, and historian, who is most familiar to Canadian researchers as the federal civil servant responsible for liaison with ethnic groups and the ethnic press during the early years of the Cold War. It argues that the attitudes and methods (Kaye) Kysilewsky brought to his job as a liaison officer were shaped by his experience as director of the Ukrainian Bureau in London. There, during the 1930s, he met and was counselled by a number of British parliamentarians, academics, and journalists, as he attempted to bring to public attention the murderous famine in Soviet Ukraine (which was denied by the Stalinist regime) and as he tried to contend with the Bureau's obstreperous Ukrainian émigré rivals, in particular the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study of the changing nature of the narrative contents and production formats of Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic parties for UK general elections from 1979 to 2010. This analysis tracked production changes that might signal a movement on the part of the political parties toward using marketing-oriented techniques of the kind found in televised advertising. Although PEBs are not technically classified as advertisements by the broadcasting industry, but rather as programs, they nevertheless present an opportunity to political parties to promote themselves and their policies. Using content analysis, it was found that PEBs have grown progressively shorter from 1979 to 2010 and become faster paced. They have become more sophisticated as productions with wider use of dramatized documentary formats rather than talking heads, popular music, and professional performers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various papers published within the issue, including "Property and Power: MPs' Assets and Support for Democratization in the 1867 Reform Act," "Enfranchisement, Malapportionment, and Institutional Change in Great Britain, 1832-1868," and "Franchise Extension and the British Aristocracy."

The article discusses the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the government of Great Britain during World War I related to the Jewish people, in 2017. Topics include the observance of the event with the annual meeting of the Association for Israel Studies, the centenary was marked by the Palestinians, demanding an apology from the British government, and considering the declaration as a step toward the goal of Zionism.