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This book considers the ways that representations of Africa have contributed to the changing nature of British national identity. It does so by developing the concept of the African presence: the ways that references to Africa have become part of discussions within British political culture about the place of Britain in the world. Using interviews, photo archives, media coverage, advertisements, and web material, the book focuses on major Africa campaigns: the abolition of slavery, anti-apartheid, drop the debt, and Make Poverty History. Using a hybrid theoretical framework based mainly around framing, the book argues that the representation of Africa has been mainly about imagining virtuous Britishness rather than generating detailed understandings of Africa. The book develops this argument through a historical review of 200 years of Africa campaigning. It also looks more closely at recent and contemporary campaigning, opening up new issues and possibilities for campaigning: the increasing use of consumer identities, electronic media, and aspects of globalization. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in postcolonial politics, relations between Britain and Africa, and development studies.

Speaking at West Point in 1962, Dean Acheson observed that Britain had lost an empire and had still to find a new role. This book explains why, as Britain's Labour government contemplated withdrawal from east of Suez, ministers came to see that Britain's future role would be as a force within Europe and that, to this end, and to gain entry into the European Economic Community, a close relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany would be essential. This account of Anglo-German relations during the 1960s reveals insights into how both governments reacted to a series of complex issues and why, despite differences that might have led to strains, a good understanding was maintained. Its approach brings together material covering NATO strategy, détente and European integration. The main argument of the book is reinforced by material drawn from British and German primary sources covering the period as a whole, from interviews with some of Harold Wilson's key advisers and from newspaper reports, as well as from a wide range of secondary publications. The introduction of material from German sources adds to its authenticity. The book contributes to what we know about Cold War history, and should help to redefine some of the views about the relationship between Britain and Germany during the 1960s.

Bob Crow was not only the most well-known union leader of his generation but also the most militant. This biography examines his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his personal characteristics (including his public persona), his politics and the power of his members, it explains how and why he was able to punch above his weight in industrial relations and on the political stage, helping the small RMT union become as influential as many of its much larger counterparts. Deploying an array of source materials and a sympathetic but critical approach, the biography traces Crow’s industrial and political development from a working-class London family, with an influential communist father and early epiphany about unions, to his rise to national prominence within the RMT. His own membership of two particular far-left political parties did not prevent him becoming the undisputed leader of the left within the RMT. This was attributable to his forceful and larger-than-life personality.

This collection of essays explores a largely neglected aspect of the history of Anglo-Irish relations: British Labour Party policy on Ireland during the twentieth century. Much of the literature on the relationship between ‘these islands’ concentrates on the present or the recent past, but by viewing an important dimension of that relationship through a wider lens, this work makes a significant contribution to the field British-Irish studies, one that will inform future research and debate. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Labour Party was broadly supportive of Irish self-government, as reflected in its espousal of a home rule settlement. However, from the end of the First World War, Labour anticipated a place in government. As a modern, maturing party that was intent on proving its ability to govern, it developed a more calculated and measured set of responses to Irish nationalism and to the ‘Irish question’. With contributions from a range of distinguished Irish and British scholars, this collection provides the first full treatment of the historical relationship between the Labour Party and Ireland in the last century, from Keir Hardie to Tony Blair. By examining the party’s responses to crises and debates around home rule, partition, Irish neutrality during WWII, Ireland’s departure from the Commonwealth, and the Northern ‘Troubles’, it offers an original perspective on longer-term dispositions in Labour mentalities towards Ireland.

This study examines how the diverse strands of the British left have interpreted the conflict in Palestine. From being overwhelmingly supportive of the Zionist movement's effort to build a Jewish state in Palestine and welcoming Israel's establishment the left, in the main, has become increasingly critical of Israel. The Labour Party, for much of its history, had portrayed Zionist settlement as a social democratic experiment that would benefit both Jews and Arabs. Its leaders turned a blind eye to the Zionist movement's sectarian practices which through its trade union and agricultural co-operatives aimed to build an exclusively Jewish economy. The rise of fascism in Europe and the Holocaust reinforced the party's support for Jewish state building in Palestine. The British Communist Party was by contrast critical of Zionism but in 1947, following the lead given by the Soviet Union, endorsed the United Nations’ partition of Palestine and subsequently ignored the plight of the Palestinian refugees. It was not until the rise of the new left, in the late 1960s, that Palestinian nationalist aspiration found a voice on the British left and began to command mainstream attention. The book examines the principal debates on the left over the Palestine/Israel conflict and the political realignment that they have helped to shape.

In contemporary British politics one of the key issues is the question of Britain itself. In this book the British question is used as shorthand for a range of inter-related issues involving history, society and politics in the United Kingdom. It is a question which involves topics such as allegiance, loyalty, identity, authority, legitimacy and belief – issues that together constitute a sense of national belonging. This book clarifies what is at stake in addressing the matter of belonging and does so within a conceptual framework that will be useful to readers trying to make sense of the complex debates about the future of the United Kingdom. It distinguishes itself from other texts on territorial politics by focusing on the United Kingdom as a whole, its elective character, its resources of affinity and its political function. The three sections of the book explore the British question from the different perspectives of history, theory and politics. The central argument is that these distinctive debates are closely related, and a coherent understanding of the United Kingdom requires familiarity with all three. The book makes a distinctive contribution towards understanding the challenges to, but also the continuing strength of, the United Kingdom.

This is a major re-evaluation of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike, which was a central event in Britain's recent economic, industrial and political history, and the first book to show the pivotal and distinctive nature of the strike in Scotland. The book's particular strengths address the limits of current understanding of the meaning and character of the strike. It: • focuses on colliery-and community-level factors in shaping and sustaining the strike, which tends to be understood in overly narrow high political terms; • examines Scottish developments, which were central to the outbreak and longevity of the strike against closures; • demonstrates that the strike was a popular and socially-embedded phenomenon, with limited connection to the ‘Scargill versus Thatcher’ dispute of historical legend and much political literature; • explores the moral economy of the coalfields, and how this shaped attitudes to coal closures and the strike • provides immediate and highly engaging history from below perspectives on society and politics in the 1980s, using interviews with strike participants.

This book offers a new interpretation of the Conservative party’s revival and adaptation to democratic politics in the early twentieth century, a period in which the British electorate more than tripled in size. We cannot appreciate the Conservatives’ unique success in British politics without exploring the dramatic cultural transformation which occurred within the party during the early decades of the century. This was a seminal period in which key features of the modern Conservative party emerged: a mass women’s organisation, a focus on addressing the voter as a consumer, targeted electioneering strategies, and the use of modern media to speak to a mass audience. New insights are provided into how the Conservatives met the challenges provided by class, gender and regional identities and the means by which the party adapted to innovations made by their opponents. Rather than offering a conventional party political history, this book provides the first substantial attempt to assess the Conservatives’ adaptation to democracy across the early twentieth century from a cultural perspective. This book will appeal to academics and students with an interest in the history of political communication, gender and class in modern Britain.

How do leading Conservative figures strive to communicate with and influence the electorate? Why have some proven more effective than others in advancing their personal positions and ideological agendas? How do they seek to connect with their audience in different settings, such as the party conference, House of Commons, and through the media? This book draws analytical inspiration from the Aristotelian modes of persuasion to shine new and insightful light upon the articulation of British conservatism, examining the oratory and rhetoric of twelve key figures from Conservative Party politics. The individual orators featured are Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine, John Major, William Hague, Boris Johnson, and David Cameron. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field and explores how its subject attempted to use oratory to advance their agenda within the party and beyond. This is the first book to analyse Conservative Party politics in this way, and along with its companion volume, Labour Orators from Bevan to Miliband, marks an important new departure in the analysis of British politics. It will be of particular interest to students of Conservative Party politics, conservatism more broadly, British political history, ideologies and party politics, and communication studies.

This book reveals the Conservative Party's relationship with the extreme right between 1945 and 1975. It shows how the Party, realising that its well-documented pre-Second World War connections with the extreme right were now embarrassing, used its bureaucracy to implement a policy of investigating extreme-right groups and taking action to minimise their chances of success. The book focuses on the Conservative Party's investigation of right-wing groups, and shows how its perception of their nature determined the party bureaucracy's response. It draws on extensive information from the Conservative Party Archive, supported by other sources, including interviews with leading players in the events of the 1970s. The book draws a comparison between the Conservative Party machine's negative attitude towards the extreme right and its support for progressive groups. It concludes that the Conservative Party acted as a persistent block to the external extreme right in a number of ways, and that the Party bureaucracy persistently denied the extreme right party assistance, access to funds and representation within party organisations. The book reaches a climax with the formulation of a ‘plan’ threatening its own candidate if he failed to remove the extreme right from the Conservative Monday Club.

Reg Prentice remains the most high-profile politician to cross the floor of the House of Commons in the post-war period. His defection was reflective of an important ‘sea change’ in British politics; the end of the post-war consensus and the start of the Thatcher era. This book examines in detail the key events surrounding Prentice‘s transition from a front-line Labour politician, serving as a cabinet minister in the Labour Government (1974-79), through to his dramatic decision to join the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher. It focuses on the shifting and uncertain political climate in Britain during the 1970s, as the post-war settlement came under pressure from adverse economic conditions, militant trade unionism and an assertive Labour Left. This biographical treatment provides an important case study of the crisis that afflicted social democracy, highlighting the emerging divisions within the Labour Party, the fragmentation and underlying weakness of the Labour Right, and the potential for an SDP-style split. The realignment of the party system became an important and ever-present undercurrent in British politics during the 1970s. The question of how best to maintain the unity of a deeply divided party became a major consideration influencing the policy positions adopted by the Labour leadership under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. The trajectory of Prentice‘s career was closely connected to the prospects of realignment, whilst his political journey from Labour to Conservative was indicative of the turbulent and transitional nature of a watershed period in recent history.

The book explores the process of rebuilding the Conservative Party under David Cameron’s leadership since 2005. It argues that Cameron’s strategy was wide-ranging and multi-faceted and that it evolved through several stages from a coherent programme of explicit modernisation into a more diffuse set of reforms. This development was partly a result of changed thinking within the Party and partly because of the pressure of external events, especially the 2008 global financial crisis and the demands of coalition government between 2010 and 2015. It traces the different elements of the renewal strategy – leadership initiatives, ideological reconstruction, policy reappraisal and enhanced electoral appeal – and it identifies the constraints on implementing Party renewal that occurred as a result of opposition from within the Party, including the parliamentary Party and the grass roots membership. It also explores the extent to which long-standing intra-party fissures, especially over Europe, exacerbated difficulties for the leadership. The book shows that the process of renewal has been through a number of stages and that its progress has been indirect rather than linear. It suggests that, although the renewal project has been relatively successful in some respects including the return of the Conservatives to government, the extent to which it has created a new Conservative Party remains contested and the Party continues to display a dangerous disunity.

This book explains devolution today in terms of the evolution of past structures of government in the component parts of the United Kingdom. It highlights the importance of the English dimension and the role that England's territorial politics played in constitutional debates. Similarities and differences between how the components of the UK were governed are described. The book argues that the UK should be understood now, even more than pre-devolution, as a state of distinct unions, each with its own deeply rooted past and trajectory. Using previously unpublished primary material, as well as a wealth of secondary work, it offers a comprehensive account of the territorial constitution of the UK from the early twentieth century through to the operation of the new devolved system of government.

The demand for equality was at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth century, but what did theorists and politicians on the British Left mean when they said they were committed to ‘equality’? How did they argue for a more egalitarian society? Which policies did they think could best advance their egalitarian ideals? This book provides comprehensive answers to these questions. It charts debates about equality from the progressive liberalism and socialism of the early twentieth century to the arrival of the New Left and revisionist social democracy in the 1950s. Along the way, the book examines and reassesses the egalitarian political thought of many significant figures in the history of the British Left, including L. T. Hobhouse, R. H. Tawney and Anthony Crosland. It demonstrates that the British Left has historically been distinguished from its ideological competitors on the centre and the right by a commitment to a demanding form of economic egalitarianism. The book shows that this egalitarianism has come to be neglected or caricatured by politicians and scholars alike, and is more surprising and sophisticated than is often imagined.

This book presents a history of local government in Britain from 1800 until the present day. It explains how local government in Britain has evolved from a structure that appeared to be relatively free from central government interference to, as John Prescott observes, ‘one of the most centralised systems of government in the Western world’. The book is an introduction to the development of local government in Britain but also balances values and political practice in relation to the evolving structures to provide a theory of the evolution of the system. It analyses local government prior to 1832 and its subsequent development into the uniform two-tier structures of the twentieth century. The book argues that the emergence of a ‘New Liberal’ national welfare state and, by the 1920s, the growth of the Labour Party, created pressures within central government to control local governments. This has led, post-1945, to the creation of larger, less-local units, and to further restraints on local autonomy, as electoral competition among National Parties to offer better public services and local economic growth ensures that national leaders cannot leave local authorities to administer to local needs as they see fit. The conclusion compares the development of British centralism with the pattern of central–local development, as well as the relative conservatism in re-structuring the systems in the United States and France.

The relationship between politics and popular culture is often seen to take one of two forms. Either popular culture is seen to disengage or pacify citizens; or it is portrayed as a source of political knowledge and expression. Such claims are rarely subjected to detailed scrutiny. From Entertainment to Citizenship is an attempt to make up this deficit by examining carefully how popular culture’s politics is understood and used. Focusing on the lives and experiences of 17-18 year olds in the UK, it explores the extent to which these young people use popular culture to think about and engage with politics. The book compares the political role of different forms of popular culture (video games, music and entertainment television), and it considers different dimensions of the relationship. It looks at the phenomenon of the ‘celebrity politician’, at popular culture as a source of knowledge about the ‘real world’ and at the group identities forged around the pleasures of music, TV and video games. We conclude that popular culture is an important source of knowledge about the world, that it helps forge identities and the interests associated with them, and it gives form to the evaluations of power and its exercise. Rarely, though, does this interplay of politics and popular culture happen in neat or straightforward ways.

This book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to rethink fundamentally the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Gay activists intersected with Trotskyism, Stalinism, the New Left, feminism and youth movements. As the slogan of the Gay Liberation Front proclaimed, ‘Come out, come together and change the world’. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. When AIDS and Thatcherism impacted on gay men's lives in the 1980s, gay politics came into its own. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. The book shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.

In the global race for skilled immigrants, governments compete for workers. In pursuing such individuals, governments may incidentally discriminate on gender grounds. Existing gendered differences in the global labour market related to life course trajectories, pay gaps and occupational specialisation are refracted in skilled immigration selection policies. This book analyses the gendered terrain of skilled immigration policies across 12 countries and 37 skilled immigration visas. It argues that while skilled immigration policies are often gendered, this outcome is not inevitable and that governments possess scope in policy design. Further, the book explains the reasons why governments adopt more or less gender aware skilled immigration policies, drawing attention to the engagement of feminist groups and ethnocultural organisations in the policy process. In doing so, it utilises evidence from 128 elite interviews undertaken with representatives of these organisations, as well as government officials, parliamentarians, trade unions and business associations in Australia and Canada over the period 1988 through to 2013. Presenting the first book-length account of the global race for talent from a gender perspective, Gender, migration and the global race for talent will be read by graduate students, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of immigration studies, political science, public policy, sociology, gender studies and Australian and Canadian studies.

Gerry Fitt was a key political figure in Northern Ireland for over twenty years, yet there is no major historical evaluation of his contribution, nor of his legacy or place in the memory of the minority community there. Drawing on unpublished party and private papers, recently released Irish and British government papers, and interviews, this book is the first academic study of the role of Gerry Fitt in the politics of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and will examine the first decade of the party through the lens of his leadership. Fitt was a driving force behind the original vision of the party and played a central role in creating the identity of the SDLP as a ‘radical socialist party’ which provided a ‘new’ style of nationalism, by prioritising socio-economic issues over the constitutional question. Yet, Fitt noted that he was often in an ‘unhappy minority of one’ over many issues and at times the relationship between himself and his party colleagues was ‘very uneasy’. This book, therefore, sheds new light on the formation of the SDLP, examining the reasons and processes through which the party was formed and the often conflicting policies and sense of political identity that the party portrayed throughout the 1970s. Contrary to the official narrative of the party, this book presents an alternative and more nuanced view of the machinations which moulded party policy in its first decade. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of modern Irish and British politics and the Northern Ireland conflict. It will also appeal to those interested in conflict resolution in divided societies.