The Rule of Law and the Rule of Empire: A.V. Dicey in Imperial Context

The idea of the rule of law, more ubiquitous globally today than ever before, owes a lasting debt to the work of Victorian legal theorist A. V. Dicey. But for all of Dicey's influence, little attention has been paid to the imperial entanglements of his thought, including on the rule of law. This article seeks to bring the imperial dimensions of Dicey's thinking about the rule of law into view. On Dicey's account, the rule of law represented a distinctive English civilisational achievement, one that furnished a liberal justification for British imperialism. And yet Dicey was forced to acknowledge that imperial rule at times required arbitrariness and formal inequality at odds with the rule of law. At a moment when the rule of law has once more come to license all sorts of transnational interventions by globally powerful political actors, Dicey's preoccupations and ambivalences are in many ways our own.     

ECJ provides further guidance on the ambit of database right

Following on from the European Court of Justice's ruling on database right in the Directmedia case, the Court has looked in more detail at the protection afforded by database right, and provided further clarification of the meaning of ‘extraction’ and ‘substantial’, particularly in relation to modular databases comprised of several sections. The ECJ's ruling is positive for database owners for the most part, bolstering its previous broad interpretation of the acts of ‘extraction’ that can infringe and considering in more detail other points touched on in the Directmedia, British Horseracing Board and Fixtures Marketing cases. This article discusses the outcome and implications of the ruling.     

Partisanship,attribution and approval in a public health shock

Political scientists have long agreed that partisanship can bias how voters evaluate government performance and attribute responsibility. However, less is known about how – and to what extent – these biases work across different types of voters, or how they respond to positive or non-partisan policy outcomes. In this research note we address these questions, focusing on how voters respond to a positive, non-partisan public health shock: the successful early rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in England. Through a pre-registered information experiment embedded in the British Election Study (N > 6000), we test how voters respond to claims that the quasi-independent National Health Service, rather than the government, deserved credit for the success of the programme. On average, subjects do attribute less responsibility to government, but this has no downstream effect on general approval. Exploratory heterogeneity analyses suggest that government and opposition supporters, as well as historic swing voters, respond homogeneously to our intervention. Our findings are not fully explained by rational or selective frameworks of responsibility attribution, and add nuance to existing experimental work on the political effects of the pandemic.     

Introduction: The Future of British Political History

Politics and history are closely intertwined and historians play a vital role in British public life. Yet, British political history, which has a critical contribution to make for understanding British politics today, faces two urgent challenges. First, academic history has retreated from subjects that remain hugely popular in media and trade publishing and of interest to social scientists, such as the histories of political institutions and formal power structures. Second, political history is disconnected from innovative trends in the wider historiography of modern Britain. Combined, these issues leave political historians in an ambiguous position in relation to the wider field, to other academic disciplines and to contemporary political debates. After discussing these challenges, this introduction surveys this special issue, which reflects on what (if anything) is distinctive about political history as practised today, and what its contribution to historiography, social science and public life should be. It ends by posing key questions for historians of all methodological stripes who investigate Britain's political past.     

The revival and decline of rank and file movements in Britain during the 1930s

The economic and political crisis of 1931 provoked the reappearance of rank and file movements in Britain. This article examines the unofficial organisations that developed in building, engineering, passenger transport and the railways – as well as more ephemeral bodies. It critically synthesises the existing historiography and replenishes it with new material from the Russian archives. The progress of rank and filism to 1939 is surveyed and the largely forgotten project of a new Communist-led rank and file organisation, a Trade Union Militant League, which would supersede the National Minority Movement, is recuperated. The article stresses the role of Comintern policy in harnessing and moulding grass-roots rebellion. It validates that strand in the literature which argues that Moscow’s subsequent turn to the popular front and aspirations to alliances with labour movement leaders predominated over, and legitimated, indigenous influences, enhanced existing adaptation to trade unionism, and encouraged subordination of oppositional movements to activity in official structures. By 1939, the Communists had abandoned the idea of a national rank and file movement they had pursued since 1923. Little survived of the revolutionary enterprise launched in 1931. Rank and filism endured only as a handful of sectional, party-sponsored, trade union ginger groups.     

The Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and nation building by Muslims/Bosniaks in the Western Balkans

The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia posed challenges for the universal concept of the Yugoslav Muslim nation for which several development paths were imaginable under the new circumstances. The concept of Bosniakdom, which was initially developed to address the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, gradually grew to become a new and coherent national program to include all the Muslims of former Yugoslavia, primarily due to its new pan-Bosniak orientation. The present article traces the conceptual history of the national ideas of Muslimdom versus Bosniakdom within the former Yugoslav states, as well as the conceptual and institutional history of the pan-Bosniak idea and movement during the 1990s and 2000s. It does this by emphasizing the decisive role the Official Muslim Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina played in their development and divulgence. This article claims that, contrary to some expectations, the strategy of internationalization and universalization of the hitherto territorial concept of Bosniakdom toward Muslims in neighboring countries during the second half of 1990s and 2000s was closely linked to the idea of the construction of the Bosniak national state. It also proposes that the evolution of Bosniakdom into pan-Bosniakdom during that time primarily followed concerns related to that goal.     

Victory without power: The Pm-Pendulum forecast

The “PM and Pendulum” model was adjusted for the 2015 General Election to take account of the Liberal-Democratic participation in government and the SNP surge. So adjusted, the model predicts a Tory vote victory by 3.4 percent over Labour. The seat forecast puts the Tories ahead with 287 seats to 263 for Labour, with 41 for the SNP. Thus another Hung Parliament! Ex-post estimates show that without the Lib-Dem adjustments the model would have predicted a Conservative majority.     

BRITAIN AND YEMEN: THE END OF BRITISH RULE IN SOUTH ARABIA THROUGH THE EYES OF A YOUNG POLITICAL OFFICER

This article publishes for the first time selections of the private correspondence (placing them in their historical context) of John G. T. Shipman (1939–2016), who took up his position as assistant adviser in the Eastern Aden Protectorate at the end of 1962 just as the first signs of political and social change were appearing in South Arabia. He served from this position in different parts of the Eastern Aden Protectorate until 1967. Shipman's correspondence allows for an unmediated appreciation of how people on the ground experienced the historical events at the time, including the British withdrawal in 1967, and highlights the extent of their own grasp of the goings-on when contrasted with the historical record. In this sense, the scope of this article is to allow the voice of one of the many British colonial officials to directly narrate their encounters during the last five years of British colonial rule over southern Arabia. The perceptive eye of a young political officer coupled with the ephemeral character of his handwritten correspondence, which providentially survived for more than five decades although it was never intended for publication, offers a fresh insight into the political and social life of the Eastern Aden Protectorate.     

Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

This article outlines a method for forecasting British general elections from national level vote shares at local elections. Although local elections are notionally ‘local’, the evidence suggests that they at least partly mirror national electoral fortunes. A simple general election vote share on local election vote share regression model that accounts for partisan differences and incumbency effects fits past data with reasonable accuracy. Based on the results of the 2013 and 2014 local elections, the model forecast a 56% probability of hung parliament, with a 78% probability of the Conservatives receiving the largest share of the vote.     

The Room and the Street: Gwen John’s and Jean Rhys’s Insider/Outsider Modernism

The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban planning, urban studies—to the way we approach public spaces. But by reading together the paintings of Gwen John (1876–1939) and the writings of Jean Rhys (1890–1979), we discern a different modernist story than we are used to hearing—one that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. By focusing on tropes of rooms in their works, the author seeks to nuance our understanding of John’s and Rhys’s relationship to community from within the supposed safety or isolation of their interior rooms, and argues more broadly for a women’s modernism of the city that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. These two figures, who are usually read as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream modernist culture, produce a distinct ‘insider/outsider’ aesthetic which reveals them to be working not outside, but at the very heart of modernist experimentation.