Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

This article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.     

The bitter end: apocalypse and conspiracy in white nationalist responses to the Islamic State attacks in Paris

Wilson's article examines how apocalyptic thinking converges with the use of conspiracy theory in white nationalist world-views at a time of crisis. Apocalyptic thinking is, typically, a religious response to secular threats to the faith community that prophesize, or are attendant on, the End. These millenarian outlooks provide communities in crisis a promise of confirmation of the object of their faith, the vanquishing of enemies and, crucially, continuity for the community in a better world to come. In the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, apocalypticism and conspiracy theory have tended to coincide. The tendency towards a binary distinction between terms of absolute good and absolute evil, and the revelation of secrets relating to human destiny through prophesy or ‘truth-seeking’ provide a broad transposability between the two interpretative strategies. An increasing amalgamation of political paranoia and eschatology have given rise to what has been termed ‘conspirituality’. Much recent white nationalist rhetoric can be understood as emerging from this discursive position, and Wilson's analysis will demonstrate how one white nationalist community drew on conspiratorial apocalypticism in its response to the multiple attacks by Islamic State in Paris on 13–14 November 2015.     

Mediated political masculinities: the commander-in-chief vs. the new man

The media play a very influential role in our perceptions of our political leaders, irrespective of where in the world they appear. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, our leaders’ personalities came to play an increasing role in their appeal, in particularly their gendered performances. As Barack Obama's presidency draws to the end of its second term, this paper will examine the representation of his persona in the context of the election in 2008 when he became the first Black US president. Much has been written of him being the first Black president of the USA, however, if we explore his campaign through a gendered lens, we can see that he is equally revolutionary. This contrasts with the gendered construction of male political leaders in other parts of the world, particularly that of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Building on work carried out in relation to the mediatisation and personalisation of politics in the last 50 years, this article shows how gendered performances can be seen to mirror changes in society.     

Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond

The nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post-1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Liberal revival’ from the late 1950s to the 2010–15 coalition might be reintegrated with contemporary historiography, including debates about deindustrialisation, class dealignment and the rise of ‘popular individualism’. It argues that careful attention to the nature and limits of Liberals’ political agency can help us understand the changing meaning and significance of third-party politics in Britain.     

Understanding UKIP: Identity,Social Change and the Left Behind

In this article we explore the structural shifts which help explain the emergence of UKIP as a major radical‐right political force in Britain. There are two distinct, but related, aspects to this story. The first is the changes to Britain's economic and social structure that have pushed to the margins a class of voters who we describe as the ‘left behind’: older, working‐class, white voters with few educational qualifications. The second is long‐term generational changes in the values that guide British society and shape the outlook of voters. These value shifts have also left older white working‐class voters behind, as a worldview which was once seen as mainstream has become regarded as parochial and intolerant by the younger, university‐educated, more socially liberal elites who define the political consensus of twenty‐first‐century Britain. We then move to consider the political changes that have further marginalised these voters, as first Labour and then the Conservatives focused their energies on recruiting and retaining support from middle‐class, moderate swing voters. Finally, we show how UKIP has developed into an effective electoral machine which looks to win and retain the loyalties of these voters. Finally, we discuss the longer‐term implications of the radical‐right revolt, which has the potential to change the nature of party competition in Britain in the 2015 election and beyond.     

The Black body and the Jewish body: a comparison of medical images

Hödl attempts to show how deeply the medical views of Blacks and Jews were embedded in racial theories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concepts of racial distinctiveness formed the framework that purportedly explained a specific liability of African Americans and Jews to various ailments. In particular, he compares the prevailing perception of the susceptibility of Jews and Blacks to tuberculosis in the United States from the 1840s to the early twentieth century, and shows that physicians advanced widely differing explanations for the proclivity to this disease, explanations that fall into three distinct periods. Within the same time span, however, there is continuity in the concepts of the 'sick Negro' and the 'healthy Jew'. The aetiologies were largely dependent on stereotypes of the bodily constructs of Jews and Blacks. Hödl thereby demonstrates the interdependence of racism and medicine.     

Greek Everyman: Andreas Papandreou at 100

2019 marks 100 years since the birth of Andreas Papandreou, Greece's first socialist prime minister and an extraordinary figure of twentieth century European politics. Looking back, the central purpose of this article is to answer pivotal questions about Papandreou and his career. What have been the major turning points in his life? What were his main beliefs? What motivated him and his politics? What were his political priorities and methods? What did he want to achieve as prime minister? Why did he become so involved in foreign policy issues? What were his assets as prime minister? Did they outweigh his shortcomings as a politician and leader? Did power change him and how? What will be Papandreou's place in history?     

National renewal in the discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile

ABSTRACT

The term neoliberalism became associated with processes of economic and social restructuring in various parts of the world during the latter years of the twentieth century. While the importance of these processes is undisputed, the extent to which neoliberalism constitutes a coherent and consistent ideology, or merely a contingent and contextual set of broadly related policies, remains a source of contention. In this article, we explore this question through a comparative analysis of the political discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile. Drawing on the model of historical comparison developed by Antonio Gramsci, we argue that these two countries represent paradigm cases of the constitutional and authoritarian routes to neoliberalism. However, by focusing on the discourses of national renewal in the speeches and writings of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, we argue that both cases rest on a particular articulation of the themes of coercion and consent. As such, we suggest that while each paradigm articulates these themes in distinct ways, it is the relationship between the two that is essential to the political ideology of neoliberalism, as the coercive construction of consensus in Chile and the consensual construction of coercion in Britain.     

The British Far Right's South African Connection: A.K. Chesterton,Hendrik van den Bergh,and the South African Intelligence Services

Utilising a new documentary source, namely correspondence between A. K. Chesterton (1899–1973), one of the most important figures of the post-war far right in Britain, and H. J. van den Bergh (1914–1997), the head of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS), this article presents a case study that leads to an enhanced understanding of the nature and workings of the overseas activities of the South African security apparatus during the 1960s, its allies and its targets. The article examines and evaluates the evidence presented in this correspondence regarding the covert operations of the South African secret services against anti-apartheid activists and other exiled ‘subversives’ based in Britain. It will demonstrate how the South African apartheid regime operated through an ideologically aligned far right proxy to physically disrupt anti-apartheid meetings and to monitor exiled dissidents, their activities and potential sources of finance, as well as exploring how Chesterton helped to refine van den Bergh's personal intellectual framework and his definition of the who and what stood behind ‘sabotage’ and ‘subversion’ in South Africa     

From New Labour to New Conservatism: the changing dynamics of citizenship as self-government

This article examines the shift in discourses of citizenship from Britain from notions of entitlement and obligation to those of self-government, and the reciprocity between the responsibilisation of individual and collective citizen-subjectivities. Against the backdrop of debates about society as the telos of government, this article will interrogate the claim that New Conservatism's ‘Big Society’ represents a unique rationality of government and an alternative formula of advanced liberal rule. By doing so, the article will extend our understanding of ‘post-welfare regimes of the social’ and illustrate precisely how they operate in contemporary Britain.     

Protecting secrets: British diplomatic cipher machines in the early Cold War, 1945–1970

This article examines how effectively Britain secured its diplomatic communications against hostile decryption during the early Cold War. It shows that between 1945 and 1970 the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office introduced and operated four advanced cipher machines, Typex, Rockex, Noreen and Alvis, which produced very strong ciphers. However, Britain did suffer physical compromises of Rockex through Soviet espionage and an attack on the British embassy in Beijing. Rockex was also vulnerable to technical surveillance of its acoustic and Tempest emissions, and the Soviets exploited this to read the encrypted communications of the British embassy in Moscow.     

The Financial Crisis and Varieties of Pension Privatization Reversals in Eastern Europe

Since the global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals in pension privatization and variation in its outcomes? Proponents of pension privatization had argued that it would boost domestic capital markets and economic growth. By revealing how pension privatization helped increase sovereign debt and how large a part of pension funds' assets was invested in government bonds, the crisis strengthened the position of domestic opponents of mandatory private accounts. But these actors' capacity and determination to reverse pension privatization depended on the level of their country's public debt and on pension funds' portfolio structure. Empirically, the argument is supported with case studies of Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak pension reform.     

WASPI's Is (Mostly) a Campaign for Inequality

Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) has mounted a vociferous campaign for full compensation to be given to ‘1950s women’ who, it argues, have suffered severe financial hardship as a result of the rise in their state pension age from age 60. That campaign has gained significant political traction, with much sympathy expressed for the plight of those affected and acceptance (most notably by the Scottish National Party and the Labour Party) that some form of compensation is urgently needed. But WASPI fails to acknowledge the rise in the state pension age's roots in the fight for women's equality, disregards the fact that the problems experienced by this cohort as they near retirement are faced by both women and men and glosses over the fact that the increase in pension age above 65 applies to both genders equally. Its campaign obscures deeper and more important issues in old‐age income replacement.     

Political Embeddedness of Public Pension Governance: An Event History Analysis of Discount Rate Changes

State governments are frequently said to manipulate the discount rate assumption to make pension funding look better, reduce employers' and employees' pension contributions, or relieve fiscal stress. Building a model from the political embeddedness perspective and applying an event history analysis to the 81 largest state‐administered pension plans in the United States, the authors found that more politically embedded pension boards were actually more likely to reduce their plan's discount rate. Public union coverage and government political ideology, however, had no significant impact on discount rate changes. These findings reveal the effect of political embeddedness on pension planning decisions and provide useful insights into the intricate process of setting pension discount rates in a new era of more muted investment return expectations. This article points to both political and financial pressures facing pension boards and state governments for many years to come.     

Mr Cameron's New Language Initiative for Muslim Women: Lessons in Policy Implementation

As the government announces a programme to teach Muslim women to speak English, this article examines how such a policy can be implemented successfully, arguing that lessons can be drawn from both academic research, especially that carried out with Muslim women themselves, and previous successful policy application. It focuses on two projects carried out in the recent past for the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and Jobcentre Plus, and outlines the key factors that led to their success. The LSC project involved one of the largest in‐depth surveys of Muslim women's attitudes towards work, and their views on life in Britain, that has ever been undertaken. The Jobcentre Plus project was a highly successful and innovative employment training initiative for ethnic minority women piloted in Sheffield, the very kind of ‘targeted’ approach that Mr Cameron has claimed his government's new language initiative will be.     

Democratic babies? Françoise Dolto,Benjamin Spock and the ideology of post-war parenting advice

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the political implications of a subject not always thought of as directly political, but which has an important ideological component: child-rearing advice. The period after 1945 offers an important example of how this topic can interact with developments in political ideology. This article takes the example of France, with substantial comparative reference to the US and Britain. It argues that the mid-twentieth century was characterized by a move from a hygienist and behaviourist approach to child rearing to a more liberal, humanist approach informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. This occurred significantly later in France – in the 1970s – than in Britain or the US, where it is associated with the years immediately after World War II. Through a comparison of two celebrated childcare experts who epitomized the change – Françoise Dolto in France, Benjamin Spock in the US – the paper explores the reasons for this temporal discrepancy. It shows that Anglo-American experts believed that the widespread application of psychoanalytic theory would help produce democratic citizens and ward off the dangers of authoritarian personalities. In France, psychoanalytic approaches became allied with conservative Catholic views of the family and women’s roles, with implications for family policy into the twenty-first century.     

Borders,citizenship and change: the case of the Sami people, 1751–2008

The Sami, an indigenous people in north-western Europe, today faces the challenge of having their territory, Sápmi, partitioned among four nation states; Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Whereas borders and citizenship are generally used to defend cultures, interests and territories, separating those who belong from those who do not, this perspective does not include how a non-dominant indigenous people such as the Sami is affected by the partitioning of their territory. Initially, when the first borders were established, the states showed respect and consideration for the Sami and their rights, but during the following centuries, more and more restrictions were being placed on the trans-border movement of the Sami people. In this process, the Sami also had to become citizens in one of the states, and even though the process of changing citizenship remained relatively uncomplicated up until the early twentieth century, the partitioning of the Sami into separate national arenas caused divisions within the people. This article focuses on how the establishment of state borders partitioning Sápmi and the enforced citizenship in the states affected the Sami, and how they acted in response to this development.     

British Intelligence and the Mandate of Palestine: Threats to British National Security Immediately After the Second World War

Recently declassified Security Service (MI5) records reveal, for the first time, the full extent of the threat that Zionist terrorism posed to British national security immediately after the Second World War. It is well established within the historical literature that after 1945 Britain faced violent campaigns by Jewish terrorist groups in the Mandate of Palestine. Hitherto unacknowledged in the historiography, however, is the fact that the threat of Zionist terrorism extended from Palestine to Britain itself. This article studies the nature of the threat posed by Zionist terrorism within Britain after 1945, and explores the counter-terrorist measures that MI5 devised to meet it. Overall, as this article shows, MI5's concerns with Zionist terrorism after 1945 offer a striking new interpretation of the history of the early Cold War.