Britain First: The ‘Frontline Resistance’ to the Islamification of Britain

The British National Party and English Defence League forged new frontiers in British political spaces in relation to anti‐Islam, anti‐Muslim ideologies. Whereas the former sought to do so in formal political arenas, the latter did so as a street‐level movement. With the subsequent waning of both, Britain First has emerged seemingly to fill the political void they left. In many ways, Britain First combines the strategies and actions of the parties that preceded it, at both the formal and street levels. This article considers what is known about Britain First, about its history, development and its ideology, and how this is manifested in terms of its political strategies and actions. This includes such activities as standing for European elections and also undertaking ‘Christian patrols’ and mosque ‘invasions’. The article considers how Britain First, while having some similarities with the BNP and EDL, is more confrontational and militaristic and is informed by apocalyptic Christianity.     

浅论农村留守妇女权益的缺失及保障

由于农村留守妇女特殊的生存环境与地位,使其不但承受着来自生产、生活、精神三个方面的压力,难以享受到小康社会的福祉,而且诸多权益难以保障致使其沦落为一个弱势群体。这种现象不但影响着农村留守妇女的全面健康发展,更影响着社会的和谐稳定与新农村建设。所以,通过整合社会资源,建立健全农村留守妇女的制度保障体系,为农村留守妇女提供强有力的权益保障和支持,培养并提高农村留守妇女的权利意识和能力,具有重要的社会意义。     

Do party leadership contests forecast British general elections?

When assessing election forecasts, two important criteria emerge: their accuracy (precision) and lead time (distance to event). Curiously, in both 2010 and 2015 the most accurate forecasts came from models having the longest lead time—albeit at most 12 months. Can we increase the lead time further, supposing we tolerate a small decrease in accuracy? Here, we develop a model with a lead time of more than 3 years. Our Party Leadership Model relies on the votes of MPs when selecting their party leader. We assess the forecasting quality of our model with both leave-one-out cross-validation and a before-the-fact forecast of the 2019 general election. Compared to both simple forecasting methods and other scientific forecasts, our model emerges as a leading contender. This result suggests that election forecasting may benefit from developing models with longer lead times, and that party leaders may influence election outcomes more than is usually thought.     

Owning the issue agenda: Party strategies and vote choices in British elections

Explanations of party competition and vote choice are commonly based on the Downsian view of politics: parties maximise votes by adopting positions on policy dimensions. However, recent research suggests that British voters choose parties based on evaluations of competence rather than on ideological position. This paper proposes a theoretical account which combines elements of the spatial model with the ‘issue ownership’ approach. Whereas the issue ownership theory has focused mainly on party competition, this paper examines the validity of the model from the perspective of both parties and voters, by testing its application to recent British general elections. Our findings suggest that as parties have converged ideologically, competence considerations have become more important than ideological position in British elections.     

恩格斯早年工人权益保障思想及其启示 ——基于《英国工人阶级状况》的思考

《英国工人阶级状况》是一部极具现实性、批判性、革命性的纪实著作.通过深入调查,在《英国工人阶级状况》中恩格斯将资本家对工人的压迫揭露得淋漓尽致,并在其中提出了保障工人饮食、住房、医疗、受教育权利等权益保障思想.这些思想具有极强的人民性、革命性、平等性,对我国当下提升新时代工人阶级的获得感、幸福感和安全感具有重要意义.研...     

‘The film gone male’: women and the transition to sound in the British film industry 1929–1932

ABSTRACT

Taking its cue from Dorothy Richardson’s essay, ‘The Film Gone Male’ written for the critical, Left-wing British film publication Close Up in 1932, this article looks at women working in the British film industry during the transition from silent to sound cinema between 1929 and 1932. It considers the effects of new sound technology on women’s roles in front of and behind the camera from production to reception and critique. It also questions whether sound technology further marginalised women as producers of cinema and interrogates whether synchronised sound masculinised film as Richardson asserted.     

粘有纸张的胶带剥离同时显现胶黏面指纹

为了更好地解决粘贴在普通A4纸上的胶带剥离与胶粘面指纹同时显现问题,本文对不同剥离试剂的剥离效果、不同显现试剂的显现效果以及不同胶粘面汗潜指纹遗留时间的影响进行了比较。实验结果表明,丙酮与无水乙醇按照1:10混合而成的试剂剥离效果最好;聚乙二醇和上海牌214型碳素墨水按照1:15混合而成的试剂显现效果最好;遗留5-7天的胶粘面汗潜指纹经染色2次后显现效果最佳,10-20天的实验样本经染色3次后显现效果最佳。     

Third molar development in a London population of White British and Black British or other Black ethnicity

Population differences in dental development between Black and White ethnic groups have been debated but not previously studied in the UK. Using inappropriate data for dental age estimation (DAE) could lead to erroneous results and injustice. Data were collected from dental panoramic radiographs of 5590 subjects aged 6–24 years in a teaching hospital archive. Demirjian stages were determined for left-sided teeth and third molars and data collected regarding hypodontia and third molar agenesis. Third molar development in self-assigned Black British, including other self-assigned Black ethnicity, was compared with that of self-assigned White British subjects. Data were compared for males and females in the two ethnic groups using T-tests for Demirjian Stages A–G of third molar development and Mann-Whitney tests for Stage H once a cut-off age at the maximum age for Stage G had been imposed. Third molar development occurred earlier in subjects of Black ancestry compared to those of White ancestry. While both ethnic groups showed large age ranges for every third molar stage, in female subjects these generally occurred at least 1.5 years earlier, and in males at least one year earlier. Hypodontia and third molar agenesis were more prevalent in White British, but the ethnic difference in third molar development persisted in subjects with complete dentitions. This is a large study that confirms ethnic differences in a London population, emphasises the difficulties of establishing the 18-year-old threshold using DAE, and confirms the risk of overestimating the age of individuals of Black ethnicity using White ethnic reference data.     

Third Ways or New Ways? The Post‐Communist Left in Central Europe

Communist successor parties in central Europe are not a homogeneous group of political actors. Processes of organisational reform undertaken in the immediate post-1989 period placed them on a programmatic trajectory which has since proven difficult to successfully modify. Parties that centralised power around a small group of elite actors have enjoyed more flexibility in their attempts to maximise votes and remain ideologically broad. Parties that radically democratised by empowering their memberships and/or middle-ranking officials have remained much more ideologically conservative and have tend to be neo-communist in orientation. This has strongly affected not just their positions in national party systems, but also their attitudes and behaviour towards foreign actors/institutions. Some communist successor parties therefore remain side-lined on the anti-capitalist far-left while others have developed into confident, outward-looking centre-left actors while one - the Slovak SDL - imploded on account of its own internal contradictions.     

The Feminist Art of Self-Education

Abstract

Sociologist Elizabeth Long has charted the emergence of women’s reading groups in nineteenth-century America. ‘The women who founded literary clubs’, Long (2004, 337) tells us, ‘were aflame with the then revolutionary desire for education and self-development, which they called “self-culture”.’ Comparable aspirations continued to fuel a drive amongst women to organize together within reading and publishing groups, usually outside of official institutions, well into the twentieth century. This ‘revolutionary desire’ for self-education has also been evident in the UK women’s art and art history movement, although it has not been addressed in thorough detail. This article therefore seeks to situate an overlooked history of artistic reading and publishing communities in relation to an established body of theory in literary and cultural studies. These theoretical materials will illuminate the importance that reading and self-education (either in person or as part of a periodical network) had in establishing solidarity, and generating debate, within a flourishing art and art history movement. The second half of this article focuses on a specific case study. FAN: Feminist Art News (1980–1993) was an independent, grassroots publication that grew out of the Women Artists’ Newsletter in London. Temporary editorial collectives published themed issues on a quarterly basis. This article contends that it is no coincidence the subject of art education formed the focus of the periodical’s first issue, as well as a subsequent issue four years later. This indicates the significance of a reflexive auto-didacticism to second-wave feminism, as well as gesturing towards the long history of ‘education and self-improvement’ that has fuelled women’s reading and study groups since the nineteenth century.