Half a Century of British Politics

Half a Century of British Politics PDF Author: Lynton J. Robins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719048401
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leading experts assess the past fifty years of British political life. Retreat from empire to Europe, with all the adjustments this entailed, is explored, as is the changing nature of politics at home.

Half a Century of British Politics

Half a Century of British Politics PDF Author: Lynton J. Robins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719048401
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leading experts assess the past fifty years of British political life. Retreat from empire to Europe, with all the adjustments this entailed, is explored, as is the changing nature of politics at home.

The End of British Party Politics?

The End of British Party Politics? PDF Author: Roger Awan-Scully
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1785903632
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 77

Get Book Here

Book Description
Elections ask voters to choose between political parties. But voters across the UK are increasingly being presented with fundamentally different, and largely disconnected, sets of political choices. This book is about this hollowing out of a genuinely British democratic politics: how and why it has occurred, and why it matters. Electoral choices across Britain became increasingly differentiated along national lines over much of the last half-century. In 2017, for the second general election in a row, four different parties came first in the UK's four nations. UK voters are increasingly faced with general election campaigns that are largely disconnected from each other. At the same time, voters acquire much of their information about the election from news-media based in London that display little understanding of these national distinctions. The UK continues to elect representatives to a single parliament. But the shared debates and sets of choices that tie a political community together are increasingly absent. Separate national political arenas and agendas still have to interact but in some respects the House of Commons increasingly resembles the European Parliament – whose members are democratically chosen but from a disconnected series of separate national electoral contests. This is deeply problematic for the long-term unity and integrity of the UK.

The UK's Changing Democracy

The UK's Changing Democracy PDF Author: Patrick Dunleavy
Publisher: LSE Press
ISBN: 1909890464
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Get Book Here

Book Description
The UK’s Changing Democracy presents a uniquely democratic perspective on all aspects of UK politics, at the centre in Westminster and Whitehall, and in all the devolved nations. The 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU marked a turning point in the UK’s political system. In the previous two decades, the country had undergone a series of democratic reforms, during which it seemed to evolve into a more typical European liberal democracy. The establishment of a Supreme Court, adoption of the Human Rights Act, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, proportional electoral systems, executive mayors and the growth in multi-party competition all marked profound changes to the British political tradition. Brexit may now bring some of these developments to a juddering halt. The UK’s previous ‘exceptionalism’ from European patterns looks certain to continue indefinitely. ‘Taking back control’ of regulations, trade, immigration and much more is the biggest change in UK governance for half a century. It has already produced enduring crises for the party system, Parliament and the core executive, with uniquely contested governance over critical issues, and a rapidly changing political landscape. Other recent trends are no less fast-moving, such as the revival of two-party dominance in England, the re-creation of some mass membership parties and the disruptive challenges of social media. In this context, an in-depth assessment of the quality of the UK’s democracy is essential. Each of the 2018 Democratic Audit’s 37 short chapters starts with clear criteria for what democracy requires in that part of the nation’s political life and outlines key recent developments before a SWOT analysis (of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) crystallises the current situation. A small number of core issues are then explored in more depth. Set against the global rise of debased semi-democracies, the book’s approach returns our focus firmly to the big issues around the quality and sustainability of the UK’s liberal democracy.

Who Governs Britain?

Who Governs Britain? PDF Author: Anthony King
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141980664
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
The British system has been radically transformed in recent decades, far more than most of us realise. As acclaimed political scientist and bestselling author Anthony King shows, this transformation lies at the heart of British politics today. Imagining - or pretending - that the British political system and Britain's place in the world have not greatly changed, our political leaders consistently promise more than they can perform. Political and economic power is now widely dispersed both inside and outside the UK, but Westminster politicians still talk the language of Attlee and Churchill. How exactly has the British system changed? Where does power now lie? In Who Governs Britain?, King offers the first assessment in many years of Britain's governing arrangements as a whole, providing much needed context for the 2015 general election.

Slade Gorton

Slade Gorton PDF Author: John Charles Hughes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Get Book Here

Book Description
Publisher description: Slade Gorton's half century in politics began in 1956. Together with Dan Evans and Joel Pritchard, he was a key player in generating a new wave of progressive Republican politics in Washington State. He helped elect the youngest governor in state history; argued 14 cases bafore the U.S. Supreme Court as attorney general; upset a legend to win a seat in the U.S. Senate; saved baseball for Seattle; angered Indians and environmentalists; championed the plight of timber towns caught in the crossfire over the spotted owl; suffered a bitter defeat and made a comback, only to lose one of the closest Senate races in American history. Gorton went on to investigate British Petroleum's safety practices, forged consensus on the 9/11 Commission and served on the 2011 Redistricting Commission. This sweeping biography explores the eventful life of a resilient politican who remains in the arena in his 80s.

The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century

The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Brian Barry
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Get Book Here

Book Description
The British study of politics throughout the twentieth century is charted and interpreted for the first time by a team of major scholars brought together on the initiative of the Political Studies section of the British Academy. The authors trace the growing professionalism of politicalscience in the second half of the century, while not neglecting significant contributions to the field by, for example, historians, philosophers, politicians, and journalists. Specialists in the various branches of the discipline provide a critical appraisal of work in areas where British scholarship has been important. Their chapters go beyond disciplinary history to provide interpretations of the interplay between the tumultuous political developments of the century andthe framework of analysis for interpreting political life. The distinctive strength of political theory and the history of political thought in British universities is examined, and attention is paid to the influential analyses of liberal democratic and administrative institutions, both comparatively and in Britain, as well as to the study of politicalparties, interests, elections, and public opinion. The innovative contribution of British authors to analyses of nationalism, totalitarianism and authoritarianism is dissected and an influential British approach to the study of international relations scrutinized. Broad-ranging introductory andconcluding chapters provide overviews of the development of Politics as an academic discipline in Britain and assess past trends and future prospects.

Penguin Books and Political Change

Penguin Books and Political Change PDF Author: Dean Blackburn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526129277
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the political ideas that shaped post-war Britain. It does so by examining the history of Penguin Books, a publisher that played an important role in circulating ideas. By situating the publisher's books in their respective historical contexts, the book constructs a new story about post-war Britain. It suggests that the wartime period ushered in a 'meritocratic moment' in Britain's political history that was eclipsed from the mid-1970s.

Race and Empire in British Politics

Race and Empire in British Politics PDF Author: Paul B. Rich
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521389587
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book discusses British thought on race and racial differences in the latter phases of empire from the 1890s to the early 1960s. It focuses on the role of racial ideas in British society and politics and looks at the decline in Victorian ideas of white Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity. The impact of anthropology is shown to have had a major role in shifting the focus on race in British ruling class circles from a classical and humanistic imperialism towards a more objective study of ethnic and cultural groups by the 1930s and 1940s. As the empire turned into a commonwealth, liberal ideas on race relations helped shape the post-war rise of 'race relations' sociology. Drawing on extensive government documents, private papers, newspapers, magazines and interviews this book breaks new ground in the analysis of racial discourse in twentieth-century British politics and the changing conception of race amongst anthropologists, sociologists and the professional intelligentsia.

A Handbook of English Politics for the Last Half-century

A Handbook of English Politics for the Last Half-century PDF Author: Sir Arthur Herbert Dyke Acland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 67

Get Book Here

Book Description


Political Deference in a Democratic Age

Political Deference in a Democratic Age PDF Author: Catherine Marshall
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030625412
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the concept of deference as used by historians and political scientists. Often confused and judged to be outdated, it shows how deference remains central to understanding British politics to the present day. This study aims to make sense of how political deference has functioned in different periods and how it has played a crucial role in legitimising British politics. It shows how deference sustained what are essentially English institutions, those which dominated the Union well into the second half of the twentieth century until the post-1997 constitutional transformations under New Labour. While many dismiss political and institutional deference as having died out, this book argues that a number of recent political decisions – including the vote in favour of Brexit in June 2016 – are the result of a deferential way of thinking that has persisted through the democratic changes of the twentieth century. Combining close readings of theoretical texts with analyses of specific legal changes and historical events, the book charts the development of deference from the eighteenth century through to the present day. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of deference, it picks out key moments that show the changing nature of deference, both as a concept and as a political force.