Search

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. Monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. In the context of the growing literature on ‘multi-speed membership’ parties, it is important to ask what non-members do for parties they support. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election, using survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties, but also voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the two groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than non-member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity in similar ways for members and supporters. However, we find no consistent impact from demographic factors or ideological incongruence. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters may match or even exceed that done by party members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An upsurge of historical research in this century has assessed various campaigns that promoted European Community (EC) membership to the British people. This article, concentrating on the Labour government’s approach to the 1975 referendum on the EC, uses sources such as official records at The National Archives and political papers of some of the key agents; these sources have hitherto been underused for investigating public opinion-related activities on Europe in 1975. Although acknowledging that the interpretation of a government-controlled referendum applies up to a point, the article emphasises, as its key theme, the government’s difficulties in controlling events during the campaign itself. Despite having much support from newspapers, the government often had difficult relations with the mass media as a whole, and the article challenges the belief that it was effective here. This article also contests the idea that the campaign made much impression on the public. These findings further apply to other campaigns on the EC in the 1960s and 1970s and potentially in contemporary British politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The campaign consulting business in the United States is the largest in the world and has had some success in globally exporting its expertise in terms of both personnel and technique. This paper reflects on the so-called “Americanization” of British elections and draws attention to some of the significant landmarks in the relationship between strategists in the two countries. The discussion does, however, identify the limitations of this idea as an organizing concept for understanding how election campaigning has developed in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are an increasing number of articles and publications that attempt to define resilience in the face of numerous drivers of risk. Most of this work has tried to identify the values and virtues that are encompassed within a resilient approach in relation to the fragile relationships between the social, natural and built environments (including, for instance, abilities to prevent, react, transform and adapt). However, much less attention has been paid to identifying the practical implications of these values and virtues once a paradigm of resilience has been adopted. In order to address this gap, this study examines what institutions in the UK have actually done when they attempt to enhance resilience. Instead of defining what resilience is, this paper focuses on what local and national governments and other stakeholders do when something is called (or is attempted to be made) ‘resilient’. The analysis of 30 key policy documents, a review of 20 formal meetings of a Local Resilient Forum, and 11 interviews with stakeholders confirm that different (and often competing) understandings of resilience coexist; but this work also reveal that two rather different approaches to resilience dominate in the UK. The first responds to security risks, based on a protectionist approach by the State, the other responds to natural risks, and prescribes the transfer of responsibilities from the State to other stakeholders. The analysis illustrates the extent to which resilience has become a highly complex, malleable and dynamic political construct with significant implications for the ways in which policy is enacted and enforced, often with unexpected consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) are a policy proposal designed to facilitate carbon emissions reduction and engender carbon consciousness: they were investigated by the UK government in 2006–2008 but subsequently shelved. With continuing growth of atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and increasing interest in behaviour change agendas PCAs are worthy of fresh development. Wide variation in energy usage between households of similar incomes implies that under the ‘standard’ model of PCAs significant numbers of low-income high-emitters would have to purchase top-up allowances. If PCAs penalise some of the worst off in society it creates a major political obstacle to their introduction. Solving this distributional problem by allocating additional allowances to certain groups or offering compensatory state benefits has been investigated and appears costly and only partially effective. This paper proposes a new ‘Mean & Max’ PCA model whereby higher usage is necessary before purchase of top-up allowances is required; potentially highly effective but consequently the volumes and values of surplus and top-up allowances become significantly different. This difference renders free market carbon allowance trading unworkable, potentially eliminating a hallmark (but publicly unpopular) PCA feature. The new model potentially offers the first solution to the distributional problem since it was highlighted in 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a national database of unimplemented planning permissions and 18 in-depth case studies, this paper provides both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the phenomenon of stalled sites in England. The practical and conceptual difficulties of classifying sites as stalled are critically reviewed. From the literature, it is suggested that planning permission may not be implemented due to lack of financial viability, strategic behaviour by landowners and house-builders, and other problems associated with the development process. Consistent with poor viability, the analysis of a national database indicates that a substantial proportion of stalled sites are high density apartment developments usually is located in low house value areas. The case studies suggest that a combination of interlinked issues may need to be resolved before a planning permission can be implemented. These include; the sale of the land to house-builders, renegotiation of the planning permission and, most importantly, improvement in housing market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A key part of the debate about the UK's membership of the EU is concern about levels of migration and the impact upon security. This paper assesses how much impact EU membership has on each of these issues, and examines the likely impact of leaving the EU in each of these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the priests of the Anglo-Saxon royal household functioned as a primitive chancery is a popular and reasonable hypothesis, corroborated both by contemporary continental practice and by the overlap between chancery and chapel evident from the twelfth century to the fourteenth. Evidence for an Anglo-Saxon chancellorship as such, however, remains frustratingly elusive. This paper argues for the existence of a special tier of priests entrusted with the king's reliquary and archive. It examines their role in the royal household, resolving conflicts in the evidence, to argue that the later office of chancellor evolved from their office. [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 article presents two case studies, concerning the allocation of £Billions by a mechanism communicated via spreadsheet models. It argues that technical analytic skills as well as policy development skills are a vital component of governance. In the UK, Central Government uses funding formulae to distribute money to local service providers. One commonly stated goal of such formulae is equity of service provision. However, given the complexity of public services, together with variations in need, delivery style and the exercise of stakeholder judgement as to which needs should be met and how, such formulae frequently obscure the process by which equity has been taken into account. One policy 'solution' to managing such tensions is to seek 'transparency'. With respect to funding formulae, this commonly involves publishing the underlying data and formulae in spreadsheets. This paper extends the argument that such 'transparency' requires an audience that understands the policy assumptions (and related conceptualisations), data sources, methodological approaches and interpretation of results. It demonstrates how the search for policy 'transparency' is also met by the technical quality assurance goals that the operational research community would recognise as best practice in the development both of software generally and spreadsheet models specifically. Illustrative examples of complex formulae acting to subvert equity are drawn from the English Fire and Rescue Service and Police Service allocation formulae. In the former, an increase in the amount of deprivation, as measured by one of six indicators, has the perverse effect of decreasing the financial allocation. In the latter, metropolitan areas such as London are found to gain most from the inclusion of variables measuring sparsity. The conclusion from these scenarios is that the steps needed to for technical quality assurance and policy transparency are mutually reinforcing goals, with policy analysts urged to make greater use of technical analytic skills in software development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the decades since the Conference on Devolution's proceedings concluded in stalemate in April 1920, the Conference has been consigned to the margins of political and constitutional history. However, within this limited literature, one interpretation of the Conference's proceedings has been universally held: that the subject of the powers the devolved legislatures should enjoy was a rare source of consensus. This article challenges this orthodoxy, using archival evidence from the Conference to demonstrate that while a consensus on powers may have existed on paper, such agreement certainly did not exist in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper is a critical review and analysis of the recent emergence of wellbeing discourses in UK national politics and their relationship with localism agendas. In 2011 the UK Coalition Government initiated a national programme to measure wellbeing. Despite a stated desire to consult the public as widely as possible on what matters for wellbeing, policy discourse is currently dominated by particular framings of wellbeing, predominantly within the arenas of subjective wellbeing research, positive psychology and individual behaviour change, where community participation and volunteerism narratives feature heavily. Ideas of wellbeing are enmeshed within narratives of reducing bureaucracy and creating the Big Society. This argument is backed up by a discourse analysis of government documentation on wellbeing and localism, which illustrates how discursive boundaries are being created around the concept of wellbeing which in turn demarcates clear boundaries of responsibility. The explicit desire on the part of the UK Coalition Government to devolve more responsibilities to the 'local community' is justified by appeals to particular ideas of wellbeing which are evidenced by particular sorts of research, limiting room for other, more progressive, accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mythology surrounds the 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. The event is portrayed as a calm and learned gathering where political dispassion and liberal tolerance towards the Soviet delegation were the order of the day. This is, in fact, a myth circulated by some of the participants who wanted to gloss over the conflict that actually characterized the congress. The notion finds its apex in the events surrounding the Special Session that is often positioned as the platform created for the Russians to deliver their papers. This was not the case. A persistent clash occurred between the Soviet delegation and Charles Singer throughout the congress, fuelled by Singer's attempts to generate publicity for the event and a powerful press reaction to the presence of the Soviets. The Congress became a significant focus for politics in Britain and Singer reacted by trying to silence the Soviets. The Special Session, far from being a platform for Marxist history of science, turned into a failed public relations exercise, and ultimately became the stage for the public humiliation of the Soviet delegates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines several methods for forecasting the next British general election on a daily basis from 20 months prior using opinion polls. It discusses their performance for previous electoral cycles and shows that the two models with the best historical record lead to substantially different predictions for 2015, but they can be averaged. The historical relationship between the polls and the vote suggests that government support rises substantially in the run up to elections, that Conservatives outperform but Labour underperform relative to the polls, and parties generally recover from low points or decline from high ones. Approximate prediction intervals and probabilities for key events are also generated. Despite the Conservatives trailing in the polls by 7 points in early October 2013, the models suggest a substantial Conservative lead at the 2015 election with a 64% chance of being the largest party and 42% chance of an overall majority. The estimated probability of a hung parliament (40%) is instructive for understanding the operation of the electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The failure of the Coalition government's attempt to reform the House of Lords has by no means taken further reform off the political agenda. The commitment to installing an elected upper chamber is still widely shared across the political spectrum, on the basis of perceptions that the House of Lords lacks democratic legitimacy. Against this view, this article considers recent literature upon non-electoral representation, deliberative democracy and bicameralism, which together highlight the possibility of an unelected second chamber playing a legitimate role within a wider (democratic) system of government. The article then considers the House of Lords from this perspective, reflecting on changes in the upper chamber since the 1999 reforms and evaluating its role within the wider political system. The paper concludes by suggesting that political debate should focus upon small-scale reforms to ensure that the Lords becomes more effective, representative and legitimate, within the constraints of its present role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political devolution in the UK has afforded opportunities for studying policy differences and similarities in relation to local-level community-based planning initiatives in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Organised around the concepts of 'lesson-drawing' and the 'filling in' of local governance, this paper critically considers aspects of policy design and development associated with community-based planning within and between the devolved UK polities. In practice, policy instruments vary with respect to their institutional, scalar and organisational rationalities. A policy mobility perspective may enable a relatively more critical understanding of how local governance arrangements are being externally and internally shaped in the respective devolved nation-regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Great Britain, engagement with civil society is an increasingly central component of public policy and governance rhetoric. However, attention has tended to focus on policy developments emanating from Westminster that relate to England, rather than the policy and governance 'spaces' emerging in the devolved administrations, such as Scotland and Wales. It has also tended to focus on the organisations through which voluntary participation takes place, rather than on voluntary participation itself. In this paper we examine the extent to which there are divergent governance spaces with regards to voluntarism apparent at the national levels of England, Wales and Scotland, set against a backdrop of wider debates on devolution, civil society, community, and the Big Society. Given the common driver of public service reform which emerges from our review, we then examine the emergence of sub-national 'spaces' through the example of rural Scotland, in which the delivery of public services can be particularly challenging. Overall, we contend that public policy towards volunteering and the voluntary and community sector ( VCS) in Scotland, Wales and England has been shaped by similar drivers, but the rhetoric surrounding their deployment and the distinct governance landscapes in Wales and Scotland have the capacity to influence the deployment of these goals in distinct ways. We also argue that greater attention may need to be paid to emergent 'sub-national' governances spaces of voluntarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The school system in England is undergoing rapid change, with the government creating more than 4000 ‘independent publicly funded schools’, known as academies, since 2010. The potential for fragmentation is considerable with diversity of governance emerging as a key feature of the new schooling landscape. Consequently, a major and widely recognised issue to which these reforms give rise concerns the future of the ‘middle tier’ –that layer between individual schools or groups of schools and central government. There are competing visions of how a future middle tier might evolve: one focuses entirely on a middle tier of individual schools and chains as a ‘self-improving system’; others conceive a continuing but revised role for the local authority (LA). The aim of this paper is to begin to explore the latter position, and in particular the potential role of the LA as a ‘broker’ of new patterns of school organisation. Drawing on interview data from three very different LA areas, the findings show that LAs differ in how they conceive their role and, consequently, on the strategies that they pursue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the impact of parties on public policy, and on immigration policy in particular, often finds limited evidence of partisan influence. In this paper, we examine immigration policy-making in the UK coalition government. Our case provides evidence that parties in government can have more of an impact on policy than previous studies acknowledge, but this only becomes apparent when we open up the ‘black box’ between election outcomes and policy outputs. By examining how, when and why election pledges are turned into government policies, we show that partisan influence depends not only on dynamics between the coalition partners, but how these dynamics interact with interdepartmental conflicts and lobbying by organised interests. In-depth process tracing allows us to see these complex dynamics, which easily get lost in large-n comparisons of pledges and outputs, let alone outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the UK the rules governing caretaker situations have historically been underspecified. The UK's constitutional traditions, such as prime ministerial discretion to time elections and its two-party system, have in the past limited the frequency and duration of caretaker periods. However, the recently lengthened election timetable, new constraints on the executive introduced by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (2011), and a decline in the dominance of the two largest parties are raising the risk that the UK will experience caretaker periods more often and for longer stretches of time. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the UK's current caretaker provisions and conclude that the existing conventions are insufficiently detailed and can render such periods problematic and controversy-prone. Important lessons, we suggest, can be learned from reforms in other Westminster systems, and from the caretaker rules of other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a growing debate concerning the increasing salience of sport to government in the UK and the role and value of community-level sport policy. Much of this debate has centred on the role of voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) and the extent to which they can contribute to the creation of social capital. This paper contributes to this debate through a case study of sport policy implementation in England. The case study firstly highlights the strategic importance attached to social capital and its associated policy context and secondly presents key stakeholder interpretations of the likelihood that VSCs will act as agents of delivery. The analysis is served by three considerations. Firstly, what is the political and policy context for a strategic orientation to social capital? Secondly, how does this orientation relate to stakeholder perceptions of what VSCs do? Thirdly, how do stakeholder perceptions of what VSCs do affect their perceptions of how they do it? The analysis is informed by a series of 14 semi-structured interviews with a number of key stakeholders and a range of public documents produced by government, local authorities and regional agencies. The conclusions suggest that, firstly, the democratic form of social capital is most dominant in relation to sport policy and, secondly, that when considered alongside VSC stakeholder perceptions, then anticipated democratic social capital outcomes may become distorted and even corrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shame has been heavily relied on as a political tool in the modern world and yet it is still a much under-historicised emotion. Using the examples of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland, I examine how women opposed to the campaign for female suffrage used shame instrumentally in their writing. Exploring the versatility of this political device, I find that shame was used with the oppositional intentions of binding and excluding. Whereas British conservatives used it to protect an already well-established imagined community of good imperial women, Irish radicals drew on it to invite women to take part in the construction of a new nationalist sisterhood. This paper further problematizes claims that as an emotion that plays on a sense of the communal, shame has had no place in a highly individualistic modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Electoral Reform Society has recently published two reports putting the case for electoral reform in local government. These suggest acceptance, in the wake of defeat in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, that the group's ultimate goal of change to the Westminster electoral system is unlikely to be fulfilled soon and that a more gradual strategy is therefore needed. This paper examines this shift by asking three questions. First, is Westminster electoral reform really a dead letter? Second, is local electoral reform more likely-and, if so, just how much more likely? Third, would local electoral reform matter in itself? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current debates around immigration are informed by hierarchies of belonging, with some groups seen to belong more, and therefore deserve more, than others. This link between belonging and entitlement has been predominantly analysed in relation to struggles over access to key material benefits, such as jobs, housing, healthcare and so on. This paper will argue that these struggles also point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to many people's sense of self, community and place and the value that comes from being positioned, and recognised, as part of a group that lies at the heart of national life and culture. In other words, the 'politics of immigration' is about the anxieties and concerns of those who no longer feel 'at home' in what they consider to be 'their' country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scottish government's white paper on independence, Scotland's future, sets out its defence blueprint following a 'yes' vote. It makes clear that its defence plans would be subject to a Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2016, as well as negotiation on the division of assets with London. However, it also provides a strong indication of how it envisages its defence posture as an independent state-a major pillar of which is founded upon strong and continued defence cooperation with the rest of the United Kingdom. Is this a realistic assumption? And, if so, how would it work in practice? Contextualized by the increased emphasis on defence cooperation which sits at the heart of NATO's Smart Defence initiative, as well as the European Defence Agency's 'pooling and sharing' programme, the article assesses the benefits and challenges that might be encountered in a defence cooperation agreement between an independent Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in the event of a 'yes' vote in September's referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 comparison of the political success of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) during the First and Second World Wars. Topics discussed include radicalisation, the degree of CPGB's influence, and CPC funding. Information on sovereignity, communist party developments, and revolutionary change in 1918 is also given.

An introduction is presented to the paper "The Declining Representativeness of the British Party System, and Why It Matters," by Heinz Brandenburg and Robert Johns, which was named the Editors' Choice for this issue and which discusses representative democracy in Great Britain.

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.