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The 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act provided the first statutory definition of homelessness. This article examines who should be credited with inspiring the legislation. This article shows that the homelessness lobby, co-ordinating their activities through the Joint Charities Group and Campaign for the Homeless and Roofless, interposed themselves between Whitehall and Parliament and the public, mediating a message about the changing nature of ‘hidden’ homelessness and its growing scale. At the same time elements of the civil service, particularly within the Department of Environment, sought to harness this lobby in order to help promote its agenda for improving the utilization of, and uniformity of access to, the housing stock within Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 19 March 1969 a small force of British policemen and paratroopers occupied the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla. The ostensible purpose of this invasion was to secure the island’s allegiance to the larger island of St Kitts to which it had been joined two years earlier as part of a new Associated State. The Associated States remained within the ambit of the residual British empire and the particular circumstances of the invasion mark it as a distinctive episode in the history of decolonization which attracted much satirical comment at the time. An examination of the policies pursued by the Wilson government illustrates some significant ways in which it was representative of British attitudes at the end of empire. There was a persistent concern that once imperial power had withdrawn, local populations would turn to nationalist demagogues and Ronald Webster of Anguilla, who led the secessionist campaign against the Kittitian connection, was viewed in this light. Doubts about the quality of local leadership were exacerbated by fears about the pernicious effect of the new foreign influences which would replace the British. In the case of Anguilla, this led to exaggerated estimates of the likelihood of the island falling under the influence of the American mafia. Following the reoccupation of the island, the Wilson government reconsidered the tenets which had governed policy and concluded that the attempt to force the Anguillans back under Kittitian control was impractical. Anguilla’s connection to St Kitts was eventually severed in 1980 and the island became a British Dependent Territory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will look at one of the key aspects in the role of local government in post-war Britain by considering how local authorities adopted broadly entrepreneurial strategies, working in partnership with the private sector, to attract investment and redevelop large sections of Britain’s major city centres from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Focusing on some of the traditional industrial cities, it will examine the idea of the entrepreneurial city and how, while it has come to partially define the role of local government from the 1980s onwards, broadly similar approaches and attitudes to city-centre development were a marked feature of the role of local government policies from a much earlier period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The so-called ‘Ugandan Asian Crisis’ (1972) is a case that crystallizes the complexity of British immigration policies in the 1960s and the 1970s. It has also been labelled as an affair that symbolizes the relatively liberal nature of the Heath government concerning issues of immigration and ‘race’. The aim of this article is to re-examine the British government’s reaction to this crisis and evaluate the claim that the British government made a prompt, humanitarian decision to admit some 28,000 British passport holders of Asian origin. It also tries to analyse the national press discourse concerning the crisis and its impact on public opposition to accepting the Asian population who were British citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to a growing literature on working-class suburbanization by arguing that both the residualization and privatization of council housing need to be properly historicized. This case study of housing policy in the borough of Brighton demonstrates that council house sales between the 1950s and 1970s were important in the residualization of inter-war estates well before the ‘right to buy’ legislation of the 1980s. Concerns about excessively affluent tenants can also be traced to the inter-war period, although it was not until the late 1950s that local Conservatives sought to push affluent council tenants into owner occupation via capping incomes and encouraging council house sales. The article shows that slum clearance had long been central to the local council’s provision of municipal housing and that apart from two short periods following the First and Second World Wars, council housing was conceived of primarily as a residual tenure by those in control of policy implementation. It further demonstrates that slum clearance between the 1920s and 1960s altered the social constituency for council housing and, combined with selective privatization, specific allocation policies and disinvestment, led to the stigmatization of certain inter-war estates. The article suggests that further case studies are needed in order to test the wider applicability of these arguments during the middle years of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the rationale behind the Heath governments 1970 decision to negotiate a Five Power Defence agreement with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia and to maintain a small British military contingent in Southeast Asia as a part of this new politico-military framework. It argues that while its overriding foreign policy concern was to end Britains problematic relationship with the European Economic Community and to make membership of this grouping the cornerstone of its foreign policy, the Heath government was careful not to cast Britains post-imperial future in purely European terms. The successful negotiation of the Five Power Defence Arrangements in 1970–71 was instrumental in achieving this by ensuring that London would maintain close links with key Commonwealth partners in the Asian region. In what was not only an attempt to neutralize potential domestic opposition to Britains entry into the EEC, but also a lingering reluctance to do away with the rhetoric of Britain as a leading power with extra-European interests, Heath was eager to show that by making a contribution to the stability of Southeast Asia, Britain still had a role to play outside Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]