The Gnomes of Washington: Four Myths of the 1976 IMF Crisis

The IMF settlement of December 1976 looms large in popular and partisan views of the politics of the 1970s. It is argued here that conventional academic wisdom has come to embody several misleading myths about its impact on economic policy. Evidence is presented to challenge four such myths which suggest that the IMF forced the Labour government to launch an attack on public spending, introduce cash limits to control public spending, introduce monetary targets and abandon the pursuit of full employment through demand management.
Although the language of the [IMF] negotiations reflected the arcane terms of international finance… the decisions required of the British Government were profoundly political… behind the technical financial decisions lay fundamental differences over the appropriate balance between the private and public sectors, the priority between capital accumulation and social welfare, the relative weight to be given to incentives and equality… What was at issue was the future shape of the political economy of Great Britain.¹     

The Intergenerational Transmission of Violent Offending

The current study examines the intergenerational transmission and concentration of violent offending using conviction data of 3,440 persons from three consecutive generations from the Dutch Transfive study. Violent offending is more concentrated within nuclear families than non-violent offending, and the intergenerational transmission of violent offending is stronger than the intergenerational transmission of non-violent offending. Due to the low prevalence of violent offending by women, only transmission from father to son is studied. Paternal violent offending before the birth of the son does not increase the son’s risk to become violent, while paternal violent offending during the son’s childhood and adolescence does. These results suggest that exposure to paternal violence plays an important role in the intergenerational transmission of violent offending.     

Recent legal developments European law

EMPLOYMENT LAW HANDBOOK: AN ADVISOR'S HANDBOOK By TAMARA LEWIS [Legal Action Group, 2005, 6th ed., 739 pp., £28.00 (paperback)]

EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL CLAIMS: TACTICS AND PRECEDENTS By NAOMI CUNNINGHAM [Legal Action Group, 2005, 396 pp., £25.00 (paperback)]

DISCRIMINATION LAW: TEXT, CASES AND MATERIALS By AILEEN MCCOLGAN [Hart Publishing, 2005. 2nd edn., 757 pp., £25 (paperback)]

FAMILY LAW AND FAMILY VALUES Edited By MAVIS MACLEAN [Hart Publishing, 2005, 342 pp., £22.00 (paperback)]

TRUSTS AND EQUITY By NIGEL STOCKWELL and RICHARD EDWARDS [Pearson Longman, 2005, 7th edn., 556 pp., £29.99 (paperback)]

HAYTON AND MARSHALL: CASES AND COMMENTARY ON THE LAW OF TRUSTS AND EQUITABLE REMEDIES By DAVID HAYTON and CHARLES MITCHELL [Sweet &; Maxwell, 2005, 12th edn., 985 pp., £32.95 (paperback)]

MODERN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW By CATHERINE COLSTON and KIRSTY MIDDLETON [Cavendish Publishing Ltd., 2005, 2nd ed., 808 pp., £35.95 (paperback)]

INSURANCE LAW: DOCTRINE AND PRINCIPLES By JOHN DOWRY and PHILIP RAWLINGS [Hart Publishing, 2005, 2nd edn, 447 pp., £25.00 (paperback)]

MASON &; MCCALL SMITH'S LAW AND MEDICAL ETHICS Edited By KENYON MASON and GRAEME LAURIE [Oxford University Press, 2005, 7th ed., 774 pp., £21.99 (paperback)]

LEGAL CONUNDRUMS IN OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD By BARONESS HELENA KENNEDY QC [Sweet and Maxwell, 2004, 57 pp., £17.95 (paperback)]

CRIMINAL LAW By CATHERINE ELLIOTT and FRANCES QUINN [Pearson Education, 2006, 6th ed. xxvi + 420 pp., £22.99 (paperback)]

DRUGS, ADDICTION AND THE LAW By LEONARD JASON‐LLOYD [ELM Publications, 10th ed., 232 pp., £29.95 (loose‐leaf with updating service)]

THE VIOLENT WORKPLACE By P. A. J. WADDINGTON, DOUG BADGER and RAY BULL [Willan Publishing, 2006, xii + 204 pp., £25.00 (hardback)]

ENVIRONMENTAL LAW By J. THORNTON and S. BECKWITH [Sweet and Maxwell, 2004, 2nd ed., 447 pp., £24.95 (paperback)]     

Lobbying in the 21st century

This paper suggests that the nature of activism is changing to take account of the shifts in political and economic conditions. It further goes on to consider that as a result of these emerging trends we have witnessed a generational shift in how governments, businesses, interest groups and citizens will interact. It is possible to place the issues and questions that this new environment raises under a number of broad headings—Democracy and Dissent, Government and Parliament, Media, and Lobbying –each of which the paper deals with in turn. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Going privately: partnership and outsourcing in UK public services

Public private partnerships provide an important illustration of the way the traditional role of government as employer and service provider is being transformed. While policy–makers argue that the growing role of the private sector is not driven by ideological thinking – that, in fact, both public and private sector organizations can benefit from working together in partnership relations – in practice it is the norms and rules of private sector management that underpin reforms. This paper assesses evidence from two detailed case studies of partnerships and demonstrates, first, that there is little evidence of mutual gains from partnership arrangements and, second, that because of an imbalance of power between public and private sector partners, any gains achieved are not distributed equitably. These results suggest that current reforms need to be refocused around building on the distinctive qualities of services provision in the public sector, rather than expanding the private sector world of markets and contracts.     

Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11

This paper focuses on the relationship between International Relations theory and ethics. It poses the question of the complicity of the discipline in the events of September 11, 2001. The paper begins with a discussion of Weber's notion of science as a vocation, and links this to the commitment in the discipline to a value-free conception of social science, one that sharply separates facts from values. The paper then examines the role of ten core assumptions in International Relations theory in helping to construct a discipline that has a culturally and historically very specific notion of violence, one resting on distinctions between economics and politics, between the outside and the inside of states, and between the public and the private realms. Using the United Nations Human Development report, the paper summarizes a number of forms of violence in world politics, and questions why the discipline of International Relations only focuses on a small subset of these. The paper then refers to the art of Magritte, and specifically Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, to argue for a notion of representation relevant to the social world that stresses negotiation, perspective, and understanding rather than notions of an underlying Archimedean foundation to truth claims. In concluding, the paper asserts that the discipline helped to sing into existence the world of September 11 by reflecting the interests of the dominant in what were presented as being neutral, and universal theories.