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This book provides a new and distinctive interpretation on the political strategy of David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. Rather than offering a chronological overview of his leadership, or a policy-based approach, the book assesses Cameronism via two themes – modernisation and manipulation. In terms of the modernisation the book will examine the following. First, how Cameron attempted to detoxify the negative image of the Conservatives. Second, how Cameron sought to delegitimise Labour as a party of government by deflecting the blame on austerity onto the legacy of Labour in office. Third, how Cameron used the Big Society narrative as a means of reducing the perceived responsibilities of the state. In terms of manipulation the book will evaluate Cameronism in relation to coalition government, and the exploitation of the Liberal Democrats will be examined, notably in relation to austerity, tuition fees and electoral reform. Cameronism will also be examined in relation the challenges to the existing political order by considering the demands for Scottish independence, and the rise of UKIP and the case for a referendum on continued European Union membership. Through this dual emphasis on modernisation and manipulation the book will provide an exploration of the key events and issues that defined the premiership of David Cameron, and a clear overview of his successes and failures as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. The book will be essential reading to those interested in British party politics and prime ministerial leadership.
experience [time] seemed subject to arbitrary political manipulation.’ 12 Being compelled to celebrate Easter on the wrong day – when everyone knew it was the wrong day – had turned the English Easter services of 1598 into a theater of the absurd. Imagine yourself a devout Christian in an English Church on 16 April 1598 – reciting the anthem ‘Christ is risen,’ hearing the Gospel’s tale of
consider Cameron in relation to manipulation, thus building on the ideas first advanced in Heppell ( 2013a ). This second part of the book is clearly influenced by the work of Riker and the theory of heresthetics (see, for example, Riker, 1982 , 1984 , 1986 ; see also McLean, 2001 , 2002 and Hay, 2009 for wider discussions about heresthetics). Heresthetics is the art of political manipulation. It
The crisis in higher education is also simultaneously a crisis in constitutional democracies; and the two are intimately linked. The corruption of language that shapes managerialist discourse makes possible a corruption in the communications among citizens that are vital in any democracy. Democracy becomes recast first as an alleged ‘will of the people’, but a will whose semantic content is prone to political manipulation. In turn this opens the way to a validation of demagogic populism that masquerades as democracy when it is in fact the very thing that undermines democracy. When the University sector becomes complicit with this – as it is in our times – then it engages in a fundamental betrayal of the actual people in the society it claims to serve. Populism thrives on the celebration of anti-intellectual ignorance and the contempt for expertise, preferring instead the supposedly more ‘natural’ claims of instinctive faith over reason. Lurking within this is a form of class warfare that treats real and actual working-class life as contemptible.
Chapter 3 focuses on the politics of the winter of 1642–3, a phase of the civil war that is normally defined in terms of a “peace party” supremacy in the House of Commons and the ultimate failure of official peace negotiations between the Long Parliament and the king known as “The Treaty of Oxford.” This chapter looks instead at a quiet but crucially important diplomatic mission sent from Common Council to the king in late December 1642. The aftermath of this deputation, which unraveled from January 1643 until the late spring and included Charles I’s call for the arrest of seven leading Londoners, and in particular the civic leaders Isaac Pennington, John Venn, Randall Mainwaring, and John Fowke, radically rearticulated London’s relationship to parliament’s war effort. The political manipulation of “the attempt on the seven Londoners,” spearheaded by the accused and their allies in parliament, ushered in a period of unprecedented popular mobilization. This included the introduction of radical new propositions for an alliance between parliament and the City, the pursuit of coordinated iconoclasm, the introduction of radical metropolitan policing methods, the raising of auxiliaries, demands for new loans, and the construction of the Lines of Communication, eleven miles of fortifications built around London, Westminster, and Southwark. Chapter 3 explores how winter 1642–3 – and a previously poorly understood period of London’s wartime narrative – led to a moment of unprecedented action, a time when London’s Common Council behaved like “a third house of parliament,” a body eager to implement its radical agenda.
This book explores the evolving African security paradigm in light of the multitude of diverse threats facing the continent and the international community today and in the decades ahead. It challenges current thinking and traditional security constructs as woefully inadequate to meet the real security concerns and needs of African governments in a globalized world. The continent has becoming increasingly integrated into an international security architecture, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa and what happens there, matters more than ever. Through an in-depth examination and analysis of the continent’s most pressing traditional and non-traditional security challenges—from failing states and identity and resource conflict to terrorism, health, and the environment—it provides a solid intellectual foundation, as well as practical examples of the complexities of the modern African security environment. Not only does it assess current progress at the local, regional, and international level in meeting these challenges, it also explores new strategies and tools for more effectively engaging Africans and the global community through the human security approach.
Representational democracy is at the heart of the UK’s political constitution, and the electoral system is central to achieving it. But is the first-past-the-post system used to elect the UK parliament truly representative? To answer that question requires an understanding of several factors: debates over the nature of representation; the evolution of the current electoral system; how first-past-the-post distorts electoral politics; and how else elections might be conducted. Running through all these debates are issues over the representation not only of people but also of places. The book examines all of these issues and focuses on the effect of geography on the operation of the electoral system.
There can be no doubt about the huge impact that Tony Blair had on the Labour Party. Labour has always been a party which embodied a high degree of internal pluralism, based on its internal factions and tendencies, its federal relations with affiliated organisations, its divided central authority, and its changing amalgam of leadership and democratic internal arrangements. Under Blair, however, there was a new centralising managerial impetus behind the search to make 'New Labour' a united and effective political force and in doing so to undermine other centres of internal power. It was generally expected, therefore, that in creating and reinforcing the leader's supremacy there would be a uniformity and homogeneity to managerial activities on his behalf. The General Election result of 2005 left Blair with a reduced majority still seeking to push through controversial legacy legislation which was to the right of the Labour Party mainstream, and still attempting also to change party and union representation. 'The Blair supremacy', such as it was, is presented as an important example of highly motivated and focused political skills but it is also evaluated as an education in broader and longer term collateral and consequential damage. The book ends with an epilogue where the party management of the new Leader, Brown is examined in the light of the inheritance from Blair, including the problems exacerbated before an election result that became recognised as 'the end of New Labour'.
Newspapers, magazines and pamphlets have always been central, almost sacred, forms of communication within Irish republican political culture. While social media is becoming the primary ideological battleground in many democracies, Irish republicanism steadfastly expresses itself in the traditional forms of activist journalism.
Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters is a long-term analysis of the development of Irish republican activist media since 1998 and the tumultuous years following the end of the Troubles. It is the first in-depth analysis of the newspapers, magazines and online spaces in which the differing strands of Irish republicanism developed and were articulated during a period where schism and dissent defined a return to violence.
Based on an analysis of Irish republican media outlets as well as interviews with the key activists that produced them, this book provides a compelling long-term snapshot of a political ideology in transition. It reveals how Irish Republicanism was moulded by the twin forces of the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the violent internal ideological schism that threatened a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the Troubles.
This book is vital for those studying Irish politics and those interestedin activism as it provides new insights into the role that modern activist media forms have played in the ideological development of a 200-year-old political tradition.
This book examines critical assessments of the woman and her work (again, that almost unavoidable conflation) from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. The author conveys some of the creative energy of Cavendish and her work in the middle years of the seventeenth century. More importantly, though, the author wants to show how her work was politically charged, not in any immediately evident way, but in a highly complex and imaginative way. The book illustrates and expands upon the book's central hypothesis: that Cavendish used genre in her writings of the 1650s as a means of articulating her powerlessness in the face of what the author comes to define as a 'triple exile'. In this book the author has, further, identified affinities in intention and circumstances surrounding the writing of texts earlier than those of Cavendish. Her take on earlier authors' rhetorical stances facilitates her own, acutely contemporary, comment and creativity. Cavendish's treatment of genre undergoes a transformation during and because of the civil wars which, to royalist minds, spelled the end of an epic past. The book differs in its emphasis from earlier examinations of Cavendish's writings. The author returns to the 'rehabilitative' nature of recent work on Cavendish and her writings, demonstrating how her own study has participated in this process of rehabilitation. Literary canonicity was, analogously, another 'place' from which Cavendish was for centuries exiled. This book represents a redemption of the writer from, at the very least, that particular iniquitous cultural corollary to the triple exile.