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

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

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

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

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

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]

The enclosure of commons and open fields was carried out by many different methods over a long period of time. Traditionally, enclosure methods have been thought to have replaced one another chronologically, unity of possession being replaced by agreements, which were in turn replaced by Acts of Parliament in the mid-eighteenth century. Recent research has however revealed the continuing importance of non-parliamentary methods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In light of this it is necessary to examine the reasons behind the selection of a particular method of enclosure, which will be attempted in this paper. It is found that the most formal, and thus most expensive, methods were used only when necessary in order to avoid conflict or legal ambiguity, or where specific local problems required them. Less formal methods were preferred where the circumstances were appropriate. Parliamentary enclosure was used as a particularly formal type of enclosure in the most complex or contentious situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will discuss the defence arguments that were used to oppose the channel tunnel, the relationship between these arguments and Britain's island status, the perceptions of British insularity, together with how and possibly why these changed in the period 1882-1975. The opposition to the Channel Tunnel project, especially in the period 1880 to 1945, can provide historians with a valuable insight into the British relationship with the sea. In particular, the opposition to a channel tunnel provides a way of analysing concepts of island status within Britain and what being an island meant to the British sense of self and identity, as they were expressed in the media as well as in official papers. At the same time, the changing attitudes to a channel tunnel, notably in the inter-war period and the post-1945 era, also show how the British understanding of what being an island state gave them in terms of security and identity changed. Such a change was as a result of new or improving technologies, particularly the aircraft, and the resulting impact it had on conceptions of security that being an island provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of the phrase 'basic research' as a term used in science policy discussion dates only to about 1920. At the time the phrase referred to what we today commonly refer to as applied research in support of specific missions or goals, especially agriculture. Upon the publication of Vannevar Bush's well-known report, Science - The Endless Frontier, the phrase 'basic research' became a key political symbol, representing various identifications, expectations and demands related to science policy among scientists and politicians. This paper tracks and evaluates the evolution of 'basic research' as a political symbol from early in the 20th century to the present. With considerable attention having been paid to the on-going evolution of post-Cold War science policy, much less attention has focused on the factors which have shaped the dominant narrative of contemporary science policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes and explains the important role of the Conservative Government of 1959–1964 in supporting the raising of the school leaving age in Britain from the age of 15 to 16. This was a significant and high-profile national issue that generated much educational, social and political debate around conflicting priorities during this period, and was emphasized in both the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963. The Treasury was strongly opposed to the proposal due to its high financial cost. There was a large element of electoral opportunism involved in the Conservative Government’s approval of raising the school leaving age (ROSLA), announced in January 1964, but it also highlighted deeper complexities and reservations in Conservative attitudes to ROSLA as well as a long-term ambition to consolidate education as a Conservative issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a discernable mood in macro-level public evaluations of party issue competence. This paper argues that voters use heuristics to transfer issue competence ratings of parties between issues, therefore issue competence ratings move in common. Events, economic shocks and the costs of governing reinforce these shared dynamics. These expectations are analysed using issue competence data in Britain 1950–2008, and using Stimson's dyad ratios algorithm to estimate ‘macro-competence’. Effects on macro-competence are found for events and economic shocks, time in government, leader ratings, economic evaluations and partisanship, but macro-competence also accounts for unique variance in a model of party choice. The article presents an aggregate-level time-series measure to capture the long-term dynamics of ‘valence’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The political impact of 'social acceleration' has recently attracted much attention in sociology and political theory. The concept, however, has remained entirely unexplored in the discipline of history. Although numerous British historians have noted the prominent position of acceleration in the late-Victorian and Edwardian imagination, these observations have never expanded beyond the realm of rhetorical flourish. The present paper attempts to build a two-way interdisciplinary bridge between British political history and the theories of social acceleration that have been posited in the social sciences, arguing that both British political historians and acceleration theorists have much to gain from further dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern conventional farming provides Western Europe and North America with reliable, high quality, and relatively cheap supplies of food and fiber, increasingly viewed as a potential source of fuel. One of the costs is continued widespread pollution of rivers and groundwater—predominantly by nutrients. In 1970, in both the United States and UK, farming was focused on maximizing yield and management practices were rapidly modernizing. Little attention was paid to the external impacts of farming. In 2010, diffuse pollution from agriculture is being seriously addressed by both voluntary and statutory means in an attempt to balance environmental costs with the continued benefits of agricultural production. In this paper we consider long-term changes in the concentration and flux of nitrate in five rural UK rivers to demonstrate the impact of agricultural intensification and subsequent policies to reduce diffuse pollution on river water quality between 1970 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of newspapers in nineteenth-century British politics has long been recognized by historians. Lord Palmerston understood keenly the power of the press and cultivated good relations with a number of papers. This article will elucidate more thoroughly than heretofore his early forays into the world of press intrigue. Palmerston did not, however, earn the regard of The Times, at least not until much later in his career. The Times, edited by Thomas Barnes from 1817 until his death in 1841, was the most powerful newspaper of the era. This article will examine the origins of its long-running feud with Palmerston, demonstrating the personal and political differences at the heart of its inception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a statistical and qualitative analysis of the hierarchical coverage of politics by UK Television news. It finds that there is a rigidly structured hierarchy of political access and focus, whereby the Prime Minister dominates over the cabinet, the cabinet dominates over ordinary MPs, the governing party dominates over the opposition, the three main parties dominate overwhelmingly over smaller parties, and the political elites dominate over ordinary members of the public. The paper also provides a framing analysis of TV news both during and after an election campaign period, and finds a skew towards 'horse race' and personalization coverage which both outweigh 'policy' issues. Thus television news is characterised by a hybrid of hierarchical and exclusive coverage of politics, combined with a narrowly expressed 'cynicism' or populist antagonism towards politics that is personalized and anti-systemic in its focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]