British Public Discourse Research Articles

Trainspotters and bullet boys: Race and class in British underclass movies, 1980–the present☆

Since 1980, the rediscovery of the urban underclass has dominated a good deal of the British public discourse on cities. British movies, which had begun to depict the working class realistically a few years earlier, at first focused on poor, alienated whites, usually with an emphatic class analysis. As non-white immigrants, particularly Afro-Caribbeans, achieved a certain notoriety among the public and the media, they began to be featured in underclass films that were often derivative of African American films; here, the explanatory variable of class was mixed with race. Notwithstanding their differences, both types of underclass movies adhere to the culture of poverty thesis, assume that the underclass is an urban phenomenon, and view the state as ordinarily indifferent to the poor when it is not actually hostile.

Justifying Aid: Reconstructing and Assessing Political Justifications for Development Aid Spending in Contemporary British Public Discourse

Foreign aid generates furious public discussion. Significant amounts of British public money are spent on aid, and citizens rightly want to know why. Unfortunately, the public discourse surrounding the justification of aid spending is shrouded in foggy ideas and cloudy arguments. I contend that this has been the case for a considerable time, and demonstrate that both a moral and rational argument for aid can be reconstructed for aid spending from existing discussions. Having given what I consider to be the strongest articulations of these arguments drawn from discourse, I suggest that both arguments have considerable flaws and suggest ways in which politicians could engage on the subject to help keep the fog at bay.

The Image of Israel and Postcolonial Discourse in the Early 21st Century: A View from Britain

The essay looks at three spheres in which ideological bias and political activism work to delegitimize the State of Israel by maligning Israel and Zionism in mainstream British public discourse. Postcolonial theory is one weight against any objective treatment of the Jewish state. The demonization of Israel in the press draws on conspiracy theories and stereotypes familiar from anti-Semitic tropes. British are fairly supportive of Israel, though divided on solutions to the Arab-Israel conflict, however a small group of anti-Zionist assert their moral stance Jews by defaming Israel's allegedly criminal activities. The analysis of public discourse in Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first century raises disturbing questions about the complex relationship between the anti-Israel campaign and latent anti-Semitism on the left and the right, and draws attention to the local context of race relations as well as the global Jihad against Israel and the West.

Recalling Empire: Anglo-American Conceptions of Imperialism and the Decline of the Nation-State

Recalling Empire:Anglo-American Conceptions of Imperialism and the Decline of the Nation-State Graham MacPhee (bio) Porter, Bernard . 2006. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. $30.00hc. 224pp. Doolan, Andy . 2005. Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $60.00hc. $20.00sc. 280pp. Boehmer, Elleke . 2002. Empire, The National, and the Postcolonial 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $95.00hc. $29.95sc. 250pp. Muthu, Sankar . 2003. Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $80.00hc. $22.95sc. 379 pp. Yet another "Treaty," this time with Mesopotamia, another vast Arab country [End Page 198] coolly annexed by Britain after the world war, under the guise of a "mandate." The Treaty—in actual fact a charter of conquest—for what Mr. Churchill calls the "provisionally independent state of Irak" has been negotiated over the heads of the inhabitants, and Baghdad . . . is in a state of "acute tension" in consequence. (Poblacht na hÉireann, 15 June 1922) Over fifty years ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tied the historical disasters of the Second World War, the Nazi genocides, and the rise of police regimes in the Soviet bloc to European imperialism through her account of "the decline of the nation-state" (1973 [1951/58]). Here Arendt traces the paradoxical configuration of the political in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, caught between the irreconcilable demands of the nation-state and economic expansion through imperialism, a configuration that would give rise not only to fascism and Soviet authoritarianism, but also to the current hegemonic position of the Western democracies—meaning principally the US. Notwithstanding the problems in Arendt's approach, her text is worth recalling here because it is radically historical in recognizing the ways in which the history she narrates redraws the parameters of both the future she inhabits and the futures she anticipates (Tsao 2004). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt figures historical destruction as itself powerfully productive or inventive, in the sense that the ruptures she charts will themselves persist or remain operative but in transformed and even unrecognizable ways: in the erosion of the substantive legal freedoms of the nation-state and the marginalization of its formal democratic mechanisms by the concentration of economic power; in the subordination of national sovereignty to global flows of capital which are themselves guaranteed by nonnegotiable supranational institutions; in the rejection by the most heavily armed states of claims to juridical universalism through assertions of "national security"; and in the persistence of "tribal nationalism" and the fantasies of "race-thinking" (1973, 227, 158). For much of the last fifty years this gesture has been unusual within public discourse in both Britain and the US. Indeed, the very phenomena which Arendt had connected to imperialism—the Second World War, Nazism, the regimes of the Soviet bloc, the undermining of formal juridico-political institutions—have been widely understood as marking precisely what separates us from imperialism: it was the war "against fascism" (within British public discourse) and the hot and cold wars "to defend freedom" (for the US) which at once redefined Britain as an imperially-innocent medium-sized nation, and simultaneously elevated the US into the stern but fair global single-parent, replete with soft-spoken demeanor and big stick. Subsequently, the extension of American global power has not only found its justification in the victims of Stalin, but after 1967 has also been conducted in the name [End Page 199] of the six million Jewish victims of Hitler's Final Solution (Novick 1999). And once the languages of revolution and liberation—taken up in the West in the 1960s as an echo of the battle for decolonization across the developing world—were marginalized in the 1970s, then the shibboleth of empire could be redirected back at the collapsing Soviet Union, whose disastrous adventure in Afghanistan allowed Ronald Reagan to cast it Darth Vader-like as the "evil empire." The different experiences of this largely shared mythology have given rise to a divergent awareness of imperial history: for Britain, the deeply ingrained sense of failure incumbent on the processes of decolonization and subordination to the US has...

‘Not Only Patriotism but Self-Interest’: War, Money and Finance in British Public Discourse 1914–1925

I would like to begin by quoting a man who loosely links Trevor Wilson's early work with my own. The man is H.N. Brailsford, one of those people who assisted the downfall of the Liberal Party by leaving it and carrying the moral heritage of Liberal Radicalism into the socialist movement when there was nowhere else for it to live, although he made that decision earlier than most of his generation. 1 Brailsford was also one of the hardest-nosed critics of British policy in the First World War, and was also, as it happened, one of the most eloquent and distinguished writers on international affairs ever appointed by yet another one of Trevor Wilson's subjects: C.P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian. The quotation I want to begin with also links Trevor's later work on the First World War with my own more recent work on the cultural history of the pound.

Indian Political Representations in Britain during the Transition to Colonialism

During the transition to colonialism, over thirty Indian political missions ventured to London. Representing the interests of Indian royalty directly in British public discourse, these Indian diplomats strove to reshape colonial policies. They also gathered first-hand intelligence, unmediated by Britons, for their Indian audiences; some later Indian diplomats evidently learned from their precursors. Nonetheless, they increasingly struggled against spreading British colonialism, with its expanding surveillance and control over political communication, growing colonial archives, ever more dominant military force, and cultural assertions. Nor did their relatively isolated efforts accumulate into unified Indian policies. The dynamics of these unequal contests reveal how multi-centered, conflicted, and contingent was political intercourse over this period, in Britain and in India. This article analyzes these Indian missions, concentrating on two: one from early in the transition to colonialism when all parties were exploring the nature of such interactions, and the other late in that process when some Indian diplomats and, even more so, the Company's Directors, had learned to deploy more sophisticated tactics against each other. The 1857 conflict, which ended the Company's rule and established British royal authority over India, altered imperial relations with India's ‘princes’ profoundly, ushering in high colonial rule.