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The case for having some – but not a majority of – members elected, either directly or indirectly, has been made by various bodies. A minority report to the Royal Commission on the Constitution in 1973 recommended that 150 members be added, drawn from the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish assemblies that the commission proposed (Royal Commission on the Constitution 1973 : paras. 297–307). However, the most prominent advocacy in recent decades has emanated from the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, set up by the Blair government in 1999
8 Reform The explicit use of temporal and spatial regulation to transform the ‘anti-social’ child or young person into a ‘decent citizen’, accepting of ‘orderly community life’, was publicised through the 1946 dramadocumentary Children on Trial, which focused on the work of approved schools in England and Wales.1 Filmed on location at the Liverpool Farm School, Newton-le-Willows, it unusually made use of one of the school’s pupils, ‘Fred Watson’, as a central protagonist in the narrative. The school’s headmaster, John Vardy, also appeared as himself, and there
Constitutional Issues concerning reform women Constitutional reform 151 11 ➤ Review of constitutional reform before 1997 ➤ Analysis of the reasons behind the Labour reform plan of 1997 ➤ Descriptions of the main reforms ➤ Analysis of the reforms ➤ Prospects for future reforms CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM BEFORE 1997 Attitudes to reform The attitude of most governments towards constitutional reform during the twentieth century has been essentially conservative. This has, of course, partly been the result of the dominance of the Conservative party for most of that
4062 building a peace economy_2652Prelims 25/11/2013 15:06 Page 138 7 Customs reform: protecting borders, confirming statehood and transforming economies? of commodities across national borders is a primary feature of conflict-related trade, customs services, tasked with monitoring the movement of goods and people across borders, emerge as central institutions in the transformation of war economies. Not only do they deal directly with the problem of smuggling in their work at border crossings, but they are also involved in the investigation and tracking of
Until the 1980s few historians dissented from the view that the Socialistled Popular Front government experimented with colonial reform but failed to bring about fundamental change in the social and political life of the colonies. 1 The metropolitan authorities lacked the political will and the monetary means to effect significant
sector (Crystal, 1995 : 7–37). Simultaneously, they have been the main beneficiaries of the willingness of the government to shore up the private sector after the 1976–77 stock market crash, the crash of an offshore market, known as the Suq al-Manakh, in 1982, and the financial crisis in 2008 (Nosova, 2016 : 74). Their privileged access to the rents has been a source of tension in Kuwaiti society and has fostered claims for redistribution among disadvantaged social groups (Beaugrand, 2019 : 59), complicating attempts towards fiscal reform following the drop in crude
4 Reforming pantheons: political group portraiture and history painting This chapter shows how group portrait paintings could recast political events as part of a celebrated national narrative. It contrasts, therefore, with the previous two chapters, which focused on how portraits could function as aides-memoires to political partisanship or identity. Group portrait paintings and derivative prints commemorated reforming triumphs through the aggregated representations of individual politicians. In doing so they presented a country of progress and enlightened
-Reformation Scotland was not static. Lay devotional practice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries changed in a number of ways, and for the most part these changes were not early Protestant or crypto-Protestant or even proto-Protestant, but Catholic; Scotland’s religious changes in the early sixteenth century were not part of the Protestant Reformation, but part of Catholic reform. They were brought
Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686-1743) was a Scottish Jacobite émigré who spent most of his adult life in France. His political works predominantly relied on a mixture of British and French doctrines to stimulate a Jacobite restoration to the British throne. Ambitious and controversial, Ramsay believed that key reforms and a growing empire would make Britain the ‘capital of the universe.’ His position as an intellectual conduit between the two kingdoms enables an extensive assessment of the political thought in Britain and France. Examining a number of important thinkers from the 1660s to the 1730s, this work stresses the significance of seventeenth century ideology on the following century. Crucially, the monograph explores the exchange of ideas between the two countries in the early Enlightenment. A time when Britain had rejected the absolutist pretensions of James II in the Glorious Revolution (1688) to protect mixed sovereignty and a key role for Parliament. This enshrinement of liberty and mixed government struck a chord in France with theorists opposed to Louis XIV’s form of centralised sovereignty. Following Louis XIV’s death in 1715, greater support for monarchical reform became evident in French political theory. Aided by the viewpoints and methodology of intellectual conduits such as Ramsay, shared perspectives emerged in the two countries on the future of monarchy.
The Labour Party government elected in 1997 pledged to reform the Westminster parliament by modernising the House of Commons and removing the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Events have consequently demonstrated the deep controversy that accompanies such attempts at institutional reconfiguration, and have highlighted the shifting fault-lines in executive-legislative relations in the UK, as well as the deep complexities surrounding British constitutional politics. The story of parliamentary reform is about the nature of the British political system, about how the government seeks to expand its control over parliament, and about how parliament discharges its duty to scrutinise the executive and hold it to account. This book charts the course of Westminster reform since 1997, but does so by placing it in the context of parliamentary reform pursued in the past, and thus adopts a historical perspective that lends it analytical value. It examines parliamentary reform through the lens of institutional theory, in order not only to describe reform but also to interpret and explain it. The book also draws on extensive interviews conducted with MPs and peers involved in the reform of parliament since 1997, thus offering an insight into how these political actors perceived the reform process in which they played a part. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the trajectory and outcome of the reform of parliament, along with an original interpretation of that reform and its implications.