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This book is the first analysis of political defections over a long time span. It investigates all the Liberal/Liberal Democrat MPs and former MPs who defected from the party between the elections of December 1910 and May 2010 - around one sixth of all those elected - as well as the smaller number of inward defectors. Each of the 122 defections was an expert judgment on the state of the party at a specific date. The research investigates the timing and reasons for all the defections and reveals long-term trends and underlying causes and apportions responsibility between leaders for them. The author finds some significant differences which distinguished defectors from loyalists and draws wider conclusions about the underlying factors which lead MPs to defect. This book will be of interest to students and lecturers of British politics and anyone interested in the relationship between British political parties in the last century.
As the governing party of peace and reform, and then as the third party striving to keep the flame of freedom alive, the Liberal Party, the SDP and the Liberal Democrats have played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm - from Earl Grey to Nick Clegg, via William Gladstone, David Lloyd George and Paddy Ashdown - have steered the Liberal vessel with enormously varying degrees of success. With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Liberal leadership since the party's origins in the struggle for the Great Reform Act have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition - and not all its leaders have managed to keep up. This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and political landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, detailed personal biographies from some of the leading academics and experts on Liberal history, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves. An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Liberal Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance through the prism of those who created it.
“Council democracy” is a particular form of democratic socialism that strives towards democratic self-governance on the basis of active, free, and associated individuals working cooperatively within a federated council system. Both in political practice and in social theory, “council democracy” has resurfaced periodically in the past, most notably in the interwar period, in the “long 1960s,” and since the turn of the 21st century. This book offers a novel theoretical and methodological approach to the study of “council democracy.” It focuses on the processes that led to the emergence of two of the foundational and most radical instances of “council democratic” movements in Germany during the German Revolution (1918-1919) and in Italy during the biennio rosso (1919-1920). With all their diversities, ambiguities, and shortcomings, these movements, in varying degrees, sought democratic alternatives to autocratic relations, from local to state levels, and to economic relations, from workplace to national levels. The book shows how the processes through which state-led war mobilization transformed the contours of class struggle laid the ground for the emergence of “council democratic” movements with specific characteristics in Germany and Italy and not in the United Kingdom and France.
This is the first biography of Rt. Hon. William Wedgwood Benn DSO, DFC, first Viscount Stansgate, cabinet minister under MacDonald and Attlee, Air Commodore with active service in both World Wars, defector from the Liberals to Labour over his dispute with Lloyd George, and father of Tony Benn. Benn served in the army and RAF during the First World War (when he took part in the first parachute drop behind enemy lines at night) and in the Second World War he reached the rank of acting Air Commodore). His eldest son Michael, heir to the viscountcy, died on active service with the RAF, leaving his second son Tony to inherit the title and a seat in the House of Lords. Before his death, Tony Benn gave extensive interviews for this book. His brother, David has also provided interviews and material, as have other members of the family including Stephen Benn (now the third Viscount Stansgate). Extensive paperwork left by William Wedgwood Benn (now in the Parliamentary Archives) including his diary and unfinished, unpublished autobiography were all utilised in the construction of this biography. Alun Wyburn-Powell has managed to construct a biographical study of real force, weaving together snippets from Benn's own private papers with insights from his family and colleagues in order to create an authentic impression of Benn and the times in which he lived.
Almost every great figure in nineteenth-century Britain, from Thomas Carlyle to William Gladstone to Charles Darwin, read histories of ancient Egypt and argued about their content. Egypt became a focal point in disputes over the nature of human origins, the patterns underlying human history, the status and purpose of the Bible, and the cultural role of the classics. Egyptian archaeology ingrained its influence everywhere from the lecture halls of the ancient universities to the devotional aids of rural Sunday schools, and the plots of sensation fiction. Dialogues with the Dead shows, for the first time, how Egyptology's development over the century that followed the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script in 1822 can be understood only through its intimate entanglement with the historical, scientific, and religious contentions which defined the era.
Long-term social and demographic changes - and the conflicts they create - continue to transform British politics. In this accessible and authoritative book Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarisation and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity and diversity. They argue that choices made by political parties from the New Labour era onwards have mobilised these divisions into politics, first through conflicts over immigration, then through conflicts over the European Union, culminating in the 2016 EU referendum. Providing a comprehensive and far-reaching view of a country in turmoil, Brexitland explains how and why this happened, for students, researchers, and anyone who wants to better understand the remarkable political times in which we live.
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.
No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.