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Following Greta Thunberg's school strike in Stockholm in August 2018 and the October 2018 'declaration of rebellion' by activists in the UK, 2019 saw several climate protest movements rise to public attention, including Fridays for Future (FFF), Extinction Rebellion (XR), and the US Sunrise Movement. What is striking about them is that they rather bluntly refer to science in their campaigns. In this paper, we present an in-depth and comparative study of how the new climate protest movements relate to scientific evidence. Employing a narrative analysis of different types of data (websites, press releases, and media coverage), we study the movements' understandings of 'the science' as well as of science's role in policy processes. We find that the movements in their initial phase predominantly rely on science for their legitimation and adopt a scientific worldview with very little 'green ambivalence'. Notably, FFF and XR hold a deficit model of existing climate communication and enact roles as science communicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the role of social movements in innovations in general and in mission-oriented policies specifically. The article shows, using the example of the contraceptive pill, how significant societal innovation requires the combination of different communities to create coalitions of change, each with slightly different interpretations of a common mission. Leading mission-driven innovation depends on being able to create and sustain these coalitions—social movements. Such innovation movements play an important role in mission-driven innovation of the kind now being pursued in many countries to ensure that innovation efforts contribute to meeting significant social challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, the norm of corporate accountability for labour standards in global supply chains has become increasingly prominent within the transnational governance arena. As global governance initiatives to spur due diligence for labour standards and combat exploitation in global supply chains—especially its most severe forms frequently described as modern slavery—have proliferated, societal coalitions have pressured states to pass domestic legislation to the same effect. In this article, we examine the regulatory processes that spurred the passage of one piece of anti-slavery legislation, the UK's 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Our findings corroborate a number of established expectations regarding business opposition towards new legislation to raise public labour standards, but also provide a clearer picture of the mechanisms through which industry actors impact policymaking processes. Paradoxically, such mechanisms include business actors' championing of weak regulatory initiatives, CSR activity and partnering with civil society organizations. Understanding industry actors' use of these strategies improves our understanding of how transnational norms of corporate accountability and anti-slavery are being contested and shaped at domestic scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the traditional retail market—a ubiquitous commercial feature of British towns and cities—produced a particular strand of heritage politics in late 1960s and early 1970s Britain. In recovering the activists involved in two campaigns to ‘save the market’ from redevelopment—one unsuccessful campaign in Bradford and one successful campaign in Chesterfield—I make the case for thinking through local urban heritage movements in comparative terms, focusing on how place-based citizenship collided with a nascent, national ‘anti-development’ mood in the early 1970s. The campaigns in Bradford and Chesterfield defended the transhistorical ‘publicness’ of the retail market—its spatial centrality, its collective ownership, and its relief of town or city rates—as a critique of contemporary, undemocratic privatization of communal space. Combining the archives of civic amenity, community action, and heritage societies with subjective attitudes towards preservation and redevelopment found in local ‘letters to the editor’ pages, this article reads the market as one physical nexus where local ‘politics’ and ‘publics’ collided and permutated in early 1970s provincial Britain. This focus on the lived heritage of socio-economic place has bearing on public history, the history of urban social movements, and architecture and planning historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1984-5 British miners' strike can be understood as a defence of place as well as jobs. Such a conception encourages us to foreground the local in accounts of the strike. However, I argue in this article that the local should not be understood in an excessively bounded way. By paying attention to relationships developed between London and the coalfields during the dispute, we can see how direct personal networks of solidarity were constructed between these very different places. This article discusses the spaces in which solidarity activity for miners in London took place. I argue that political activists rooted themselves in localities by constructing permanent spaces such as centres and bookshops, which enabled the development of concrete relationships between different places. I highlight 'twinning' as a distinct spatial tactic used by supporters of the strike to bridge geographical distance and develop personal connections between London and the coalfields. I also show that elements of the state were used to both sustain this solidarity and to restrict the space available for the miners and their supporters. I argue centrally, therefore, that opposing political visions for moving beyond the post-war settlement manifested in a struggle over space in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evans and Mellon's 'Working class votes and Conservative losses: solving the UKIP puzzle' seeks to resolve a puzzle: how substantial levels of UKIP support among traditional working class voters, and in Labour-held constituencies, can be reconciled with evidence that a majority of current UKIP supporters recall voting for the Conservatives in 2010. Evans and Mellon (2015, Journal of Parliamentary Affairs, doi:10.1093/pa/gsv005). advance two arguments to resolve this puzzle. First, that the political impact of UKIP has been misunderstood due to a failure to consider long-term political shifts. Second, that the class basis of support for UKIP has been misunderstood due to poor measures of class. We find much to agree with on both of these points. This reply focuses on clarifying our arguments on three issues: the social basis of UKIP support; the role of value divisions and the importance of geography and the electoral system for understanding UKIP's longer-term prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chartism has generated one of the liveliest historiographies of the twentieth century, with the development of new linguistic and cultural approaches in the 1980s proving to be a particularly innovative line of enquiry. Yet the shift towards language and meaning has not been without a price. In particular, the tendency to frame Chartism as an intellectual force has led scholars to overlook the fact that Chartism was also a social movement, constituted, quite literally, of millions of working men and women, who had traditionally been excluded from the political sphere.This article uses working-class autobiography to restore a social-history dimension to our understanding of Chartism. It asks how a body of men with no experience of bourgeois forms of civic engagement orchestrated such a large-scale and sophisticated political campaign. How had a working-class ‘public’, with the capacity for effective political action, been created? And how, if at all, was the emergence of the world’s first workers’ movement related to the broader socio-economic context—in particular, to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation with all the social flux they entailed? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite a substantial historiography on the 'pro-Boers', the role of women in the British campaigns against the South African war has never been systematically examined. This article discusses women's activism through the two main pro-Boer organizations, the Stop the War Committee and the South Africa Conciliation Committee, and through Liberal women's organizations. It examines women pro-Boers' arguments and attitudes to both pacifism and imperialism. Finally it considers the gender aspects of the pro-Boer campaigns, the development of distinctively feminist arguments against war, and the effects of the war on the British women's suffrage movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the notion of a modular repertoire of contention within a political context. The work of sociologist Charles Tilly regarding such social movement actions is addressed. Other topics include the history of resistance by Great Britain, the notion of transferability of various forms of demonstrations, and the role of British members of Parliament in public meetings and petitions. Also noted is the role of Methodist movement activists in public activism, while the relation of war and taxation to society is addressed.

This paper examines the controversy surrounding the 1990 ‘Bristol Study’ as an indicator of developments in health activism and medical research in the United Kingdom in the subsequent decade, and as a case study of the motivations prompting people to become activists. Researchers investigating complementary therapies at the Bristol Cancer Help Centre found the therapies were associated with poorer survival prospects. However, the study was later shown to be seriously flawed. Stung by researchers' insensitivity, participants formed the Bristol Study Support Group (BSSG) to lobby for new funding and journal review procedures, and for participants to be co-investigators. Their agenda was symptomatic of activists increasingly seeking to become integral to research processes. Groups like the BSSG were helped by the New Labour party's interest in increasing civic involvement. However, activist participation was limited to research planning and administration, not results interpretation, suggesting that, while activists could influence the politics of 1990s medical research, research practice was immune. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Clash's London Calling was released just at the moment when the British punk movement seemed to be imploding. From the earliest reviews, it was received as a musical masterpiece that drew on many styles while still managing to be ‘punk’ in some sense. This article argues that London Calling normalized punk, allowing it to be more than an event: punk could henceforth be assimilated into traditional musical discourse and aesthetics. As a careful balancing act between punk street-cred and mainstream musical values, London Calling allowed a double reading. Punk fans could find in it what they sought: anti-establishment anger and at times a messy, disdainful approach to conventional musicianship. At the same time critics and listeners who had come since the late sixties to assimilate rock into a Romantic (or post-Romantic) system of ‘art’ values could find in it what they sought: stylistic growth, organic coherence, originality, and even a ‘universal’ narrative of struggle, triumph, and redemption played out across the album. It is possible to isolate not only a story, but musical connections between the songs (keys, recurrent motifs, and topoi) all laid out in a logical manner. However, unlike concept albums in the seventies' progressive rock style against which punk reacted, London Calling often calls attention away from its musical coherence, and even its textual coherence, rather than towards it—such as by the last-minute addition of a bonus track that disrupts the narrative and key schemes established earlier. The ease with which the album can be praised in established musical language should not completely obscure its potential (and the general potential of punk) to undercut and confront conventional musical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with a moment in the eighteen-twenties when, it has been argued, British expatriates and middle-class Indians in Calcutta came together to form a multi-ethnic reform public. It is often assumed that this public emerged as a result of the introduction of press censorship in 1823. This article, by contrast, argues that the origins of the reform movement should be traced to the unlikely surroundings of the vestry of one of Calcutta's Anglican churches. The article gives us a new perspective on India's 'age of reform', and shows how municipal reform, often considered to be a metropolitan phenomenon, not only surfaced in the colonial world but also prepared the ground for later campaigns for free trade, judicial reform and a representative legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination freedom in India and applies the critical category of difference in its assessment of the Gandhian nonviolent resistance to British colonialism. It discusses the application of Western concepts in explaining the historical development of India and examines how this practice, which is grounded in Western historical experiences, creates negative conceptualizations of Indian development. It explores how the type freedom sought by the Gandhian movement differed from Western concepts of freedom and examines the historical roots of India's notion of freedom.

This article examines Labour's relationship with the Co-op in the period between the formation of the Co-operative party and the 1958 publication of the report of the Co-operative Independent Commission written by Anthony Crosland. It shows how the Co-op's increasingly poor economic performance shaped that relationship and how the Co-op's principles of voluntarist consumerism caused conflict with the Labour party. The tension generated by the Co-operative party's refusal to affiliate to the Labour party is examined, with particular attention being paid to the Attlee years. Finally, Crosland's report on the Co-op is presented in the light of the fraught relationship detailed over the preceding period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the methodological challenges in evaluating whether, and how, human rights litigation has an impact in the world outside the courtroom. Drawing on research carried out for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in Britain on the impact of selected human rights legal cases on the delivery of public services, it argues that assessing impact requires us to cast the net wide. Impact may be evident in legal judgments and the generalizable principles they enshrine. Impact may be seen in resulting changes to public policy and its implementation - including the process by which decisions are made. It may also be evident in outcomes in the form of both empirical social realities and the experience of people delivering and using the services that are implicated in the judgment. The article further argues that understanding the mechanisms by which legal judgments are (or are not) translated into changes in policy and practice enables the human rights practitioner to identify barriers to impact and make recommendations that go beyond individual cases to the very process of translating law into the realization of rights. The article situates this analysis in the context of work in other national contexts to use litigation instrumentally alongside other forms of social action to pursue human rights goals – and wider academic debates about the risk of creating an artificial disconnection between law and political action in the promotion of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hanover Club was a discussion group founded by British and German students at the University of Oxford in 1911 to 'promote the cause of good-feeling between Germany and England by giving Englishmen and Germans in the University opportunities of meeting and discussing topics of interest and importance to both nations'. Based on the unpublished minutes of its discussions, this article highlights problems of mutual perception among its members by examining the discourse on some key themes: domestic and foreign politics, the future relationship between the two nations, and 'voices prophesying war'. The paradiplomatic activities and aspirations of the club members are situated in the contexts of pre-1914 pacifism, the conciliation efforts of private Anglo-German pressure groups, and the interaction between students of both nationalities in Oxford in the early twentieth century. It is proposed that the creation of a bilateral network among students was intended to lay the groundwork for a new, more personal and therefore more efficient form of diplomacy. Previous research has been inclined to dismiss the pre-1914 British-German conciliation movement as a fringe phenomenon, and to overlook bilateral contacts at the youth level altogether. By contrast, it is argued here that this movement had the potential to attract future members--both liberal and conservative-- of the Wilhelmine and Edwardian power elites. The traditional dichotomies of 'germanophile' vs. 'germanophobe' and 'anglophile' vs. 'anglophobe' are shown to be of limited analytical value for a discussion of the complex political situation of the prewar years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chartism existed to exert pressure on the parliamentary classes, yet the interaction between Chartism and its audience has rarely been closely examined. Studies of the political engagement with Chartism have usually focused on questions of policing and control, but such an emphasis was only possible if Chartism was first delegitimized as an authentic popular voice. This article explores the upper-class engagement with Chartism, arguing that it was interpreted not as a political movement but as a social pathology. Neither the charter nor its spokesmen were accepted as representative of the people, with observers instead projecting their own interpretations onto the movement. As a result, the Chartists were unable to force serious constitutional debate or to confront M.P.s with a compelling popular authority distinct from their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates that there is more than one context in which to place early modern polemical pamphlets, and by submitting one particular tract from 1642 to intellectual, political and bibliographical contextualization, it highlights the implications for our understanding of a particular work's ‘meaning’ and purpose. By means of a close textual reading, as well as a detailed archival examination of ‘three kingdoms’ political manoeuvring, and examination of copy-specific information, it indicates that early modern politicians had a subtle understanding of the utility of print, and of the need to reach out to different political audiences in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the achievements and contributions of political activist, Dora Russell within the program of the British Labor Party during the 1920s. Her political and literary work highlights the relationship between the body and political ideology in the 20th century. Russell constructed a socialist politics from the material experience of the female body in sex and motherhood, which is a politics rooted in concerns about the plight of working-class women and shaped by ideas of modernity.

This article is concerned with the power of language to shape and confirm social work's identity and to control its essential direction and task. Social work has perennially concerned itself with communication but paid surprisingly little attention to the more abstract concept of language. The authors trace the changing language used throughout social work's UK history, placing this into sociopolitical and socio-economic context and analysing the discourses thus created and promoted. We identify three broad periods in the development of social work, characterized as the moral enterprise, the therapeutic enterprise and the managerial enterprise. We conclude by connecting this discussion with some key challenges, issues and dilemmas currently facing social work in the criminal justice and community care arenas, highlighting the language and discourse of punishment, risk management, consumerism and the market economy. The article concludes by arguing that social work must reclaim the language of its activity as it engages with the challenges to its identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the contribution of a study of public participation in two English cities to the theorization of the relationship between policy context and local action in Great Britain. Issues discussed within the particular context provided by the discourse of the New Labour government; Mobilization of collective action within social movements; Implications of the analysis on understanding the relationship between public participation and political renewal.

This article investigates the specificities and particularities of women's constitutional mobilization in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It not only writes women into the story of recent constitutional change in the United Kingdom, a subject seldom examined in leading constitutional texts, but it also strives to nuance generalizations about British feminism. By outlining and assessing the differences in women's representational struggles and strategic choices across the United Kingdom, the article contributes to the literature on women's mobilization and its general impact on states and state policy, particularly at the subnational level. Variations are explained through an examination of changing political and socioeconomic contexts, as well as shifting identity politics patterns. The latter prove to be particularly insightful as identity politics strategies are shown not to be inevitably destructive, as is often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of women in contemporary politics of Great Britain. It is stated that the idea that women are equal to men, but different and that they have an important function as housewives and mothers was stressed in the Great Britain. According to the author, when feminism did begin to emerge in the region as a distinct movement, it tended to draw on somewhat different political tradition. British feminists continued to be more imbued with a class of analysis of politics and tended to reject the goals and traditions of suffragettes as bourgeois palliatives. Thus, the limited changes in patterns of female candidature seemed less remarkable.

The article explores the ideas and context which informed the Men's Dress Reform Party (MDRP) from 1929 to 1940 in Great Britain. According to the author, the MDRP is more fairly situated within a loose cluster of progressive individuals and groups whose reform agenda of the first third of this century range well beyond dress. In addition, the MDRP suggests that one should qualify the use of the term movement for British dress reform recognizing that there may have been more diversity and less common cause than is sometimes suggested.

The article focuses on the future development of feminist film culture in Great Britain. The author discusses the strategies to women's art practice, maintaining that a unified, non-contradictory feminism is no longer a threat to the institutions of art exhibitions and criticism in which male dominance in art can be maintained. The author infers that feminist art asserts a discourse about the intersubjective relations which constitute feminine positions in history. The author also comments on Christine Gledhill's article "Recent Developments in Feminist Film Criticism," published in the journal "Quarterly Review of Film Studies" regarding several key problems for feminist film theory.

The article discusses the origin, progress and outcome of the "reorganization movement" which began to gather momentum in the early 1930's. On January 1, 1945, the Mineworkers' Federation of Great Britain, which had been the dominant trade union in the British coal industry ever since its organization in 1888, was renamed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The development of a "National Union" from a "Mineworkers' Federation" had little or nothing to do with the nationalization of the industry itself. The "nationalization" of the industry and of the union in the mid-1940's was coincidence, not cause and effect. The modernization of the union's structure has greatly facilitated the union's adjustment to nationalization. The NUM has developed a new set of structural problems since and largely because of, the nationalization of the industry. The British mineworkers, unlike their American brothers, were organized into trade unions largely through movements with local origins. The aim of these movements was the establishment of effective district organizations in particular coalfields.

When the British Labor Headquarters had decreed the greatest general strike in history, there floated out through the night, to the wonderment of passers-by, strains of that emotional old hymn, "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah." Whether the reported incident be true or not, it illustrates clearly the fact that labor does not consider its major contests mere bread-and-butter battles. It does not act from a cold-blooded belief that an opportune time has arrived to put the screws to a disorganized consuming public or gouge its hereditary enemy, the capitalist. They conceive their struggle to be primarily ethical. It is because they stand at Armageddon that they sing. They do not talk of money but of justice. Although labor views its contests as being primarily ethical, the concrete issue is generally one wages. It struggles for a fair wage, a wage to which it has a right, a "just wage." Few people have any definite idea of what is meant by a just or unjust wage but the belief that wages are often unjust is probably as old as human society.

The author relates the author's perspective regarding the new Education and Inspection Bill in Great Britain. He stressed that the bill put an imminent verge of educational change that is likely to augment the very segregation that the Labour movement has for so long assayed to get over. Benefits of the bill include fewer failing schools, more attention to parental choice, more autonomy for schools, better discipline and better motivation of pupils, and a revolution in school meals.