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2444Ch17 3/12/02 17 2:07 pm Page 388 Kenneth A. Armstrong and Simon Bulmer The United Kingdom: between political controversy and administrative efficiency Introduction: once a latecomer always a latecomer? European integration has represented one of the most fundamental challenges for politics in the United Kingdom since 1945. Integration has highlighted the problems of, and possibilities for, the re-orientation of foreign policy as part of the United Kingdom’s post-war descent from world power status. The ‘Monnet method’ of supranational integration
Chase 01_Tonra 01 22/01/2013 11:04 Page 9 1 The United Kingdom in 1820 Prologue On 1 January Joseph Farington rose at 8.20 a.m., feeling ‘very unwell’. This may explain why he failed to step outside his home in London’s Charlotte Street, as was his custom, to note the temperature. But he recorded in his diary that it was ‘a thick discoloured morng and day’. The temperature on rising on New Year’s Eve had been minus 3 degrees centigrade in a ‘thick frosty haze’. By Wednesday 5 January his thermometer read minus 8: he had last recorded a positive reading on 23
Introduction This chapter provides an overview of the salient features of Islamophobia in the United Kingdom (UK). It explores how the concept is related to ongoing issues of racism, orientalism, and social exclusion, all of which are perpetuated by a deepening sense of ethnic nationalism, which is exclusionary to both indigenous-born minorities who are citizens of the state and outsiders, including white and Christian groups that herald from European Union (EU) Christian-majority nations. This virulent nationalism aims to
2 Comparing France and the United Kingdom Beyond Devolution and Decentralisation is inspired by a long tradition of Franco-British comparison (Lagroye and Wright, 1979; Ashford, 1982; Cole and John, 2001). Whether they are defined in terms of legal frameworks, state traditions or political culture, the UK and France have represented distinctive liberal democratic poles. These two states share sufficient traits in common, however, to make comparison meaningful. In his conceptual map of Europe, Rokkan identified three types of European state: the strong empire
184 CASE STUDIES 9 The government of the United Kingdom: the Women’s National Commission1 wendy stokes Introduction There have been two significant stages in the creation of national machineries for women within government in the United Kingdom. The first phase was in the 1960s and 1970s, when anti-discrimination and equal pay legislation was accompanied by the creation of the Equal Opportunities Commissions (EOC) in England, Scotland and Wales, and the UK-wide Women’s National Commission (WNC). The governments of the 1980s and 1990s established a Minister for
4 The United Kingdom: full-time breadwinners and part-time fathers Introduction The changing nature of fatherhood was a controversial topic in British social science debates. At the heart of British debates lay a quintessentially liberal dilemma about the extent to which men’s traditional role as breadwinners came under strain from ‘new father’ ideologies, feminism and the ‘secular norm’ of both parents working and caring (Dean, 2001:267). On the one hand, research studies suggested that the shift towards new father ideologies had not come from British fathers
This book is about what steps should be taken to ensure that the United Kingdom does not fragment. It examines the state of play concerning the devolution of powers in the UK and considers the impact which the Brexit process could have on devolution in the future. It contributes to the debate about what a post-Brexit UK should look like and whether now, at long last, the nation needs a comprehensive written Constitution. After looking at the present situation concerning the protection of human rights in the UK, and by drawing lessons from the experiences of four other common law countries in operating written Constitutions – the USA, Canada, Australia and Ireland, it concludes that the UK should not seek to acquire a single written Constitution and that a much more useful advance would be to turn the nation into a federation. Far from endangering the Union, which is already fragile, a formalised federal structure could strengthen the bonds between the four constituent parts of the UK and encourage all of its people to strive towards upholding a value-based set of national goals articulated in legislation. The book argues that a Constitutional Reform Act should be enacted to create the federation, while retaining the country’s name as ‘the United Kingdom’. The same Act should make related reforms such as reconstructing the House of Lords, adopting a UK Bill of Rights and creating a fairer method for deciding how funds should be allocated by central government to the three devolved regions.
seizure of assets; (5) and facilitates the denial of their existence in the UK. Notes 1 We cannot avoid an early coda. Tracing the chronology of outlawry and proscription through the history of what, today, is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (shortened to the UK) necessarily requires some jagged jurisdictional deviations. The United Kingdom has, as is well known, only been ‘united’ since 1707. Before then, its boundaries have ebbed, flowed, fractured and expanded. For the sake of clarity, we use the periodisation very helpfully
3 Building the United Kingdom’s integrity machinery: the role of the Committee on Standards in Public Life Introduction The previous chapter analysed the United Kingdom’s traditional approach to integrity issues, identifying in particular the reluctance of the political class from the 1920s to the 1990s to treat the subject of ethics and integrity systematically or to learn lessons from episodes of misconduct in public life. Eventually, this approach became untenable. The eruption of the cash-for-questions scandal demanded a new strategy which began in 1994 with
9 The MMR debate in the United Kingdom: vaccine scares, statesmanship and the media Andrea Stöckl and Anna Smajdor Introduction In 1998, British surgeon and researcher Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the British journal The Lancet , suggesting that there was a link between the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and the development of