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This article analyses the development of the Council of Social Service for Wales during what is often called the Golden Age of the Welfare State. Recovering the neglected history of the peak organisation for voluntary social service in Wales adds to our understanding of the histories of social policy and postwar Wales. The article addresses social policy from a doubly peripheral perspective – it attends to a territorial periphery of the UK State while voluntary action can be left at the margins of Welfare State analysis. From this perspective we hope to cast new light on the historiography of the ‘British Welfare State’

The ‘Act of Union’ Bill stands out among proposals designed to reform and, ultimately, save the UK’s Union of nations and jurisdictions. Taking the form of draft framework legislation, it offers a blueprint for how UK-wide constitutional change might be instigated. In doing so, the Bill provides a useful thought experiment in constitutional design: it allows us to consider how a distinct set of reforms to the Union might interact with recent legal and political developments. This paper offers a critique of clause 2 of the Bill, which envisions new roles for the courts in respect of a constitutionally novel set of ‘core purposes’ of the UK state. While analogous legislation and case law suggest that a limited role is intended for the courts, we argue that clause 2 would pose significant constitutional dilemmas. Involving the courts in a contested vision of the Union and its aims could risk jeopardising the political confidence in judicial independence which is required for the effective resolution of intergovernmental disputes. Further, the ambiguous constitutional character of the Bill, which seeks to reflect traditions of both popular and parliamentary sovereignties, could facilitate a more assertive constitutional role for the courts in their approach to a clause 2-type provision. This would risk further politicisation of the judicial role.

Has Brexit has triggered a constitutional crisis? Crisis is one of a family of concepts, including tipping points, catastrophic equilibrium and failure, identifying it as a decisive moment for overcoming contradictions and ambiguities. Across multiple UK levels – the whole state, constituent nations and different legal jurisdictions – even in ‘normal times’ the constitution has been marked by both a dominant ‘Anglo-British imaginary and territorial ambiguities. Drawn into political debate, these ambiguities became sources of basic constitutional instability during Theresa May’s premiership. Although May avoided full-blown constitutional crisis, one may yet come. Equally, she did oversee basic constitutional change, not necessarily in the form of crisis. Brexit, Crisis, UK constitution, pluri-constitutionalism, Anglo-British imaginary, devolution

In January 2012, IPPR published The dog that finally barked: England as an emerging political community. In it we argued that an emerging English political identity may over time come to challenge the institutions and practices of the UK more profoundly than anything happening in the so-called Celtic fringe, even Scottish independence.Our new survey provides an opportunity to determine whether these conclusions – many new, some controversial – are still supported by subsequent data. It also allows us to gauge the effect of real-world events, such as the Queen's diamond jubilee and the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012, on public attitudes to Britishness, and to focus on a pair of key areas of interest: Europe, which has risen to much higher prominence in the 18 months since our first report, and the attitude of England's BME community to identity and England's relationship with the UK and Europe.Among the report's conclusions: This new survey, conducted in November 2012, confirms that more people in England continue to identify more strongly as English than British: there was no discernible 'British bounce' following the public flag-waving events of 2012. Those who do identify more strongly as English are also hold stronger feelings of discontentment with England's unions. That is, they are dissatisfied with the constitutional status quo within the UK, which is seen to favour Scotland and under-represent England's interests, and with England's place in Europe: English people – much more than any other regional population in Europe – see the European parliament as being highly influential. By this analysis, Euroscepticism appears more strongly to be an English concern than a British concern. England's BME community is less prone to identify as English rather than British, but those who do demonstrate the same attitudes towards the UK and Europe as the wider population, albeit less strongly. According to people's political preferences, there is a strong relationship between identifying as British, feeling discontentment with the constitutional status quo and supporting Ukip – by this evidence, Ukip is much less the UK independence party than it is an English nationalist party. Although it has been reluctant to play the 'English card', doing so could strengthen its appeal to voters in England, with potentially far-reaching political implications.

This report presents evidence which suggests the emergence of a new kind of Anglo-British identity in which the English component is increasingly the primary source of attachment for English people. It also suggests that English identity is becoming more politicised: that is, the more English a person feels, the more likely they are to believe that the current structure of the UK is unfair and to support a particularly English dimension to the governance of England.It has long been predicted that devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would provoke an English ‘backlash’ against the anomalies and apparent territorial inequities of a devolved UK state. The evidence presented here suggests the emergence of what might be called an ‘English political community’, one marked by notable concerns within England about the seeming privileges of Scotland in particular and a growing questioning of the capacity of the current UK-level political institutions to pursue and defend English interests, and one underpinned by a deepening sense of English identity.This report presents the findings of the Future of England (FoE) survey, which represents one of the most comprehensive examinations of English attitudes to questions of identity, nationhood and governance to date – and the only major survey in this area conducted in England since both the formation of a coalition government at Westminster and the election of a majority SNP administration in Holyrood.