The Lion and the Eunuch: National Identity and the British Genius

The Lion and the Eunuch challenges the failures of British politicians to adequately understand the complexities, and the subtleties, of British national identity, and goes on to define it for them. It also explains reasons for our current confusions over who we are in the world. In 1940 Orwell wrote The Lion and the Unicorn as a rallying cry for a richly identifying country that was still able to imagine itself, and re‐imagine itself, as the need arose. This essay suggests that without a radical change of government policy and thought, that power will continue to decline with far reaching consequences for the peoples of these islands.     

Letter from North Haven … Or What the President Should Do Next

Letter from North Haven is an essay on American national identity that shows the depth of small town mentalities in American life—no matter that that life is mainly urban and industrial. We move from Chicago School sociology to the Catcher in the Rye; from Bob Dylan to Steven Spielberg; from Jacksonian Democracy to the Tea Party movement. The essay ends by using the example of politics in North Haven, Maine, to call upon the President to revive his campaign by explaining America's problems in the plain style and tangible context of small town USA.     

Does Institutional Structure Effect Public Health Expenditures?

This paper explores supply‐side costs and institutional structure in a shared authority state public health system. It is found that in a shared governance public health system, intermediary district structure influences the movement of limited resources to serve populations and persons most in need. This early empirical test suggests that policy making and public administration concerning public health expenditures in a shared governance system are in a practical sense local, but decisions made at the intermediary level by regional district administration are an important influence on local public health expenditures.     

How Can Deliberative Democracy Get a Grip?

One of the most exciting innovations within ‘practical democratic theory’ in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well‐honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small‐scale deliberative exercises to the ‘main game’, politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.     

A War on ‘Risk’? British Government and the National Security Strategy

This article explores the United Kingdom's National Security Strategy (NSS) since 2008, considering what the NSS discloses about how contemporary Whitehall conceptualises ‘risks’ to Britain. It contends that rather than being a strategy in the Clausewitzian sense, the NSS represents a political exercise in risk management. In addressing a range of quite different problems, the NSS suggests that those in Whitehall now conceive their role as being to shield the citizen from any conceivable threat to their safety, wellbeing, and even emotional security. Yet this constitutes a highly expansive vision, and elevates the state's provision of public goods to a potentially unmanageable level.