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Keir Starmer's ambition is to lead a decade of national renewal. Labour sought to lean out of the politics of polarisation which has so often dominated the last decade in British politics. It was successful in winning a landslide election victory - yet Labour's 2024 electoral coalition was both extraordinarily broad and unusually narrow at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour have for too long foregone thinking about ideas of Britain, Britishness and the British state, believing there are more important things to do such as winning elections and governing well. This essay asserts that Labour's avoidance of thinking too deeply about these concepts has come at a heavy cost: buying into traditional ideas of Britain and Britishness and not addressing the power dynamics of the British state and UK politics. These are fundamentals Labour and the centre-left must address in order to win and remake UK politics and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has the dominating influence of husband's/male partner's class position on his wife's/partners' political party identification declined in Britain? Contrary to predictions, previous research did not reveal a decline in male dominance. We claim a more accurate test by using a theoretical-based cohort design and more appropriate models. To investigate the relative impact of women's and their men's class position, we analyse married and partnered women in the British Election Surveys and distinguish four cohorts with a 1888–1991-birth range and model the relative impact of spouse's class positions with adjusted logistic diagonal reference models allowing the absolute association to change over time. The results show that in case the husband is self-employed, a skilled labourer/foreman or an unskilled/semiskilled labourer, there are no cohort changes in the relative association and women weight their own class position equal to that of husband's class position. However, there is a substantial cohort effect in case the husband has a salariat or lower white-collar class position. In such cases, there is a male dominance class association, but this disappeared for the most recent (i.e. 1961–1991) birth-cohort. For most classes, a sharing-model (both partners equally important) is for the youngest cohort the most appropriate description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Levelling up' – a policy agenda focused on reducing regional inequalities – has become the new mantra in British politics. This paper critiques the policy programme from its emergence in 2019 to the publication of the 2022 levelling up White Paper. While it is a welcome recognition of gross regional inequality, local institutions lack capacity to deliver, there has been little genuine devolution and our analysis shows that little new funding has been committed. 'Levelling up' could simply become the latest in a list of politically useful but empty slogans which are used as a substitute for resources and devolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical evolution of the office of the Governor-General in Australia, highlighting its declining political powers and the changing relationship with Great Britain over the years. Topics discussed such as the early political roles of governors-general, the impact of the Balfour Declaration on their powers, and the controversial dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by Governor-General Sir John Kerr in 1975.

Despite the adversarial character of debates in the British House of Commons, Members of Parliament (MPs) observe a highly ritualized rhetorical style emphasizing collegiality and mutual respect across party lines. The language MPs use in this context harks back to an ancient pre-democratic past. Why does a modern democratic legislature conceal partisan conflict by using pre-democratic ritualistic references to "the House" as a corporate actor? Why do they call their fiercest competitors "honourable Members" or even "Friends"? In this paper, we review the results of important empirical studies suggesting that the activities even of modern democratic parliaments (based on intense party competition) reveal traces of pre-democratic corporate bodies in some respects. Analyzing a large corpus of parliamentary speeches in the British House of Commons between 1988 and 2019, we propose a novel technique to identify and measure references to collegiality in Britain's parliamentary system. We demonstrate the extent to which such references vary systematically by party and across time, suggesting that they are used strategically in the stylized and ritualized language of parliamentary debate in the Commons depending on the status of MPs as members of government or oppositional parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a personal account of the author's activism and advocacy work before and during the Windrush scandal in Great Britain, where she as a community activist and trade unionist, co-founded Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC).

The article shares experiences of the author's mother and grandfather as Black Caribbean migrants in Great Britain and France, highlighting their sense of belonging, challenges faced as migrants, and the contrasting narratives of welcome and hostility towards migrants in the Great Britain.

An interview with Caryl Phillips, a professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, is presented exploring his views on the Windrush scandal and its significance in historical, cultural, and political contexts.

The article informs about the media's neglect of the Windrush scandal, focusing on the reasons for the lack of follow-up by other media outlets, and explores the relationship between the political and media classes, the concept of "worthy victims" in the media.

This article considers the roles of faction and connections between centre and periphery as structuring elements of local politics during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. It explores these issues through an examination of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales. Using a considerable amount of previously unexamined printed and manuscript material, it argues that established but largely ignored factional alignments informed a good deal of the political manoeuvring in the county during and after the first civil war, and that these connected to and were complicated by evolving associations with rival political coalitions at Westminster. The article pays close attention to the connections between figures among the Pembrokeshire gentry and MPs and power-brokers in Westminster. It argues that establishing fruitful links with the political centre was vital to the success of an Independent group in the county following the war's cessation and, conversely, the isolation and ultimate defeat of the Presbyterian party. The article throws new light on the origins of John Poyer's 1648 rebellion, which initiated the 'Second Civil War'. It rejects the established narrative which characterises Poyer's revolt as borne from apolitical self-interest, arguing instead that it was the final act in a factional struggle that was at least a decade old. The piece contends that gentry faction has largely been written out of recent civil war history, but that scholars should be more attentive to its potential for influencing (although not conditioning) political and ideological alignments in the provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political career and writings of Richard Champion (1743–1791), a Bristolian Quaker and merchant who acted as a local supporter and agent of the Rockingham Whigs. It aims to recover a forgotten aspect of Lewis Namier's original ambition to understand eighteenth-century politics through the perspective of relatively ordinary people such as merchants and civil servants. However, against old Namierite assumptions, as well as much of the recent historiography on the post-1760 period in British politics which focuses on a dichotomous conflict between 'radical Whigs' and 'new Tories', this article restores the importance of the Rockingham Whigs. Importantly, it shows that a commercial Dissenter such as Champion could be fully attuned to the aristocratic and party-centred interpretation of British politics associated with the Rockinghamites and Edmund Burke, and thus encourages us to consider the idea of 'aristocratic government' in inclusive and eclectic ways. The case-study of Champion demonstrates that a close reading of political correspondence from the period can confirm, as well as destabilise, the Whig history of party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global geopolitics has entered a period of conflict and confusion. As Britain faces decisions over its future role in the world, social democrats face challenges and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper celebrates Shauna Singh Baldwin, a Sikh woman's contribution to strengthening her national discourse through her novel, What the Body Remembers. This research also aims to examine the factors involved in creating a nation and nation-state, using the Partition of the Subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan and India as an example. The theories of nation and nationalism by Renan (1883), Gellner (1983), Anderson (1991), Stalin (1994), and Bhabha (1994) have been used to construct the theoretical framework for the current study. Through this novel, written by a woman and based on the Partition of India, the researcher highlights the "female voice." This paper concludes that Baldwin has reinvented Sikh history and customs in her novel and connected her people with their glorious past and the sacrifices of their ancestors. She has highlighted the Sikh community's contribution and disappointment during the Partition of the sub-continent. This research also highlights how Baldwin criticizes British policies, which became the main reason for huge bloodshed during migration. This paper may help the future researcher to focus on the reinterpretation of social, historical, and religious myths from the female point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands' settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands' condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling family actively cultivated the protection of Dutch and British imperial agents and played one empire against the other. Imperial agents veered between intervention and restraint, and Cocos-Keeling islanders invoked protection to blunt rulers' power over them. The politics of protection continued into the twentieth century. Despite international attention to self-determination, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were not positioned for statehood, and full and effective integration into the British empire or Australia was perennially delayed. The territory's history as a place of seemingly permanent semi-autonomy illuminates a global pattern in which protection politics worked to suspend sovereignty and in some cases perpetuate social and racial inequalities, both inside political communities and across the international order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Liberal Party's 1972–4 revival under Jeremy Thorpe placed it at the heart of political debate in 1970s Britain—a period marked by inflation, strikes, and recurrent talk of political 'crisis'. This article explores the evolution of Liberal policy, strategy, and support between 1970 and 1979, and argues that Thorpe and his colleagues were agents as well as beneficiaries of electoral dealignment. As long-standing critics of class politics, Liberals were well placed to exploit voters' frustrations with Edward Heath and Harold Wilson and to articulate demands for a more collaborative and participatory style of government. Thorpe's populist critique of the two-party system was backed up by a distinctive plan for economic and political renewal, in which social, industrial, and constitutional reforms would give governments the legitimacy to make incomes policies work. These ideas resonated strongly in the two 1974 general elections, but the Liberals' new-found support was relatively shallow, and Thorpe's appeal was waning even before the Norman Scott affair forced his 1976 resignation. The 1970s Liberal revival nevertheless laid important political foundations which the SDP/Liberal Alliance would build on after 1981, as it sought to articulate a centrist alternative to Thatcherism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan governance studies have traditionally focused on factors such as effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of public goods and services. Yet, we have recently seen the resurgence of debates around metropolitan democratic governance at the same time as the consolidation of new structures of metropolitan government have occurred in several European countries. In spite of that, there is still an important knowledge gap about metropolitan models of government and metropolitan electoral systems. Through the comparative analysis of metropolitan governments in the United Kingdom, France and Germany we identify four main models: metropolitan presidentialism, localist metropolitan parliamentarism, consolidated metropolitan parliamentarism, and full metropolitan government. Moreover, the comparative analysis shows not only the influence of the respective local institutional contexts in the metropolitan government and electoral systems, but also how these reforms are opportunities to introduce innovative institutional designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor highlights the context and themes discussed in a special issue of the periodical focusing on the ongoing cultural and creative response to the Windrush scandal.

The article reflects on the historical mistreatment of Black people in Britain, highlighting the labor exploitation and lack of recognition of their contributions, while expressing frustration and resistance towards current hostile treatment and deportation threats faced by the Windrush generation.

The memoirs of the parliamentarian lawyer and MP Bulstrode Whitelocke are invaluable as a primary source for historians wishing to understand the political history of the 1640s and 1650s. Yet, despite broad recognition of the contentious nature of this material, surprisingly little has been done to establish the accuracy of Whitelocke's account or to probe the motives behind the writing of his post-Restoration reflections. By focusing on Whitelocke's recollections of two famous encounters with Oliver Cromwell in 1651 and 1652, this article demonstrates that there is much in the detail of those accounts that fails to convince in the light of what is known of events and the author's activities from evidence beyond his memoirs. Rather, it seems that the accounts of these meetings were fabricated in order to obfuscate Whitelocke's activities during the Interregnum period and to propagate a series of narratives that served the author's purposes as he sought political rehabilitation after the Restoration of 1660. By failing to recognise the memory games at play in Whitelocke's work, historians have unwittingly embedded many of those same narratives in their accounts of the period, not least concerning the durability of the regime established in 1649 and Cromwell's kingly ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Conservative Party is caught between mainstream conservatism and radical right populism. It thus has much in common with other European parties of the centre right, but its electoral success is unusual. What does this tell us about British Conservatism? And what are the long-term implications for British politics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence suggests that as public opinion towards immigration becomes more negative, so the descriptive representation of ethnic minority groups is increasingly restricted. Recently, some initial research into the causal mechanism hinted that this effect is driven by patterns of candidacy. This suggests that political parties are creating an 'ethnic penalty' of their own in the selection stage. This paper investigates the relationship between patterns of candidacy, party strategy, and public opinion in Great Britain from 1997 to 2019, and proposes that 'punitive parties' are strongly responsible for shaping the representational outcomes of minority groups. I find support for earlier suggestions that parties are increasingly likely to place ethnic minority candidates away from 'winnable' contests as anti-immigrant hostility rises. These findings are important for our conceptions of ethnic penalties, of party behaviour in selection processes, and for the study and cause of improving political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do institutions adapt and reform themselves in response to new challenges? This article considers the role of ideas and posits that the concept of 'dilemma' – clashes of beliefs played out through power relations and practices – offers a complementary tool to understand institutional change. It draws on the 2014 appointment of a new Clerk to the UK House of Commons – in which conflicting beliefs about the House of Commons administration opened a dilemma for key parliamentary actors – as a token case study to highlight the value of the concepts of beliefs, practices and dilemmas. It further broadens out these findings to consider the value of a wider interpretive approach for understanding how institutions may adapt and change. In doing so, it makes (1) a theoretical contribution by exploring the role of ideas in causing institutional change and (2) an empirical contribution through its analysis of parliamentary administration, an understudied area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]