British Public Policy Research Articles

Preparing for progressive change from opposition

Preparing for progressive change from opposition

Understanding Social Insurance: Risk and Value Pluralism in the Early British Welfare State

This article seeks to make two contributions to the understanding of social insurance, a central policy tool of the modern welfare state. Focusing on Britain, it locates an important strand of theoretical support for early social insurance programs in antecedent developments in mathematical probability and statistics. While by no means the only source of support for social insurance, it argues that these philosophical developments were among the preconditions for the emergence of welfare policies. In addition, understanding the influence of these developments on British public discourse and policy sheds light on the normative principles that have undergirded the welfare state since its inception. Specifically, it suggests that the best model, or normative reconstruction, of social insurance in this context is a value-pluralist one, which pursues efficiency and equality or solidarity, grounded in group-based perceptions of risk.

Salience, Valence, Positions and Voting: International Affairs and British Electoral Politics in the 1960s

This article provides a detailed study of the British public and foreign policy issues in the context of electoral politics in the 1960s, a time when the country had to adjust to the shifting geopolitical realities and economic constraints affecting its international role. It analyses several key areas of electoral politics: the general and electoral salience of external and domestic issues; valence evaluations of the parties’ competence on international affairs; and the bivariate and multivariate associations between foreign policy attitudes and voting behaviour in 1964 and 1966. Undertaking detailed analyses of data from quantitative sources relating to public opinion and electoral behaviour, it shows that positional and valence considerations relating to foreign and defence policy were associated with voting for or against Labour at these general elections, even though more generally foreign policy issues were of lower salience than domestic issues during this period of flux and uncertainty in Britain’s international role. The findings contribute to psephological debates concerning the nature of the electoral landscape in the 1960s and the role of external issues at post-war elections. It also extends the scope of scholarly research on the foreign policies and related party politics of the 1964–70 Labour governments.

‘The Towers of Terror’: A Critical Analysis of Ernő Goldfinger’s Balfron and Trellick Towers

When J. G. Ballard published his masterpiece High-Rise in 1975, many readers in London automatically identified the apartment building that is the protagonist of the dystopian novel as the infamous Trellick Tower at Kensal Town, certainly one of the most controversial and ambiguous figures of British architecture after World War II. Designed by Ernő Goldfinger, the tower, which had recently been completed, was already considered a symbol of the brutality of contemporary architecture, to the point of gaining the nickname ‘Tower of Terror’ coined by its own inhabitants. Actually, in public opinion the nearly twin sister of the earlier Balfron Tower at Poplar embodied all the ills of urban planning and of the housing policies of the post-war reconstruction. The large size of the project, the uniformity of its facades, the presence of bulky stairwells separated from the main volume, connected by elevated bridges and brandishing the big chimneys of the heating system, the complex apartment layouts on multiple levels, and the intensive use of fair-face reinforced concrete are the factors that shape the extraordinary character of this work of architecture, examined in a relatively small quantity of critical writings, despite the building’s widespread notoriety. The Balfron Tower, commissioned in 1963, and the Trellick Tower commissioned in 1966 have become, for better or worse, icons of British public housing policy, and today they are inseparable parts of the London cityscape. Critical analysis of the original project documents reveals how the typological and constructive reflections at the end of the 1960s had reached a level of extreme sophistication and quality, also in the development of large social housing complexes created for the urban proletariat. Thanks to their outstanding constructed quality and the efficacy of their residential typologies, the towers have stood up to the destructive fury of the last few decades, even becoming Grade II* listed buildings. In recent years, they have gone through a remarkable process of social and generational turnover, coveted as investment properties and involved in processes of real estate speculation.

Keeping Up Appearances: The British Public Policy Response to the Trafficking of Domestic Workers in a Changing Regime of Social Protection

ABSTRACTThe UK domestic work industry is expanding. Private arrangements with domestic workers are growing in a setting where the cost of social care is progressively passed on from the state to the family. Yet domestic workers are increasingly unprotected despite the legislative and policy apparatus that British governments developed over the last decade to tackle human trafficking. Drawing on case law and empirical data, this article indicates how the welfare, migration, and labor market regime regulating social protection in the UK structures an environment of labor exploitation, which prevents authorities from tackling phenomena of exploitation and trafficking.

How Keynes came to Britain

I explore how Keynesian ideas made their way into British public policy. I argue that the breakdown of pre-First World War macroeconomic conditions led to a ‘blocked’ system, where the adjustment mechanisms presupposed by classical economics were jammed, and that Keynesian economics offered an escape from this system. I explain the Keynesian response to the new problems in monetary and fiscal policy: the gold standard impeding credit control, and the tenacity of the balanced budget rule, respectively. Finally, I outline how Keynes's ideas took hold after the Great Depression via the events at the Macmillan Committee, and their policy implications.

Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 ed. by Elizabeth Eger (review)

Reviewed by: Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 ed. by Elizabeth Eger Mary A. Waters Elizabeth Eger, ed., Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pp. xv + 309. ₤60.00/$95.00. The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of interest in eighteenthcentury women’s intellectual life. Propelled by such books as Harriet Guest’s Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 and Anne Mellor’s Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830, both published in 2000, this new turn in research has shredded the twentieth-century commonplace that feminine modesty kept women out of the public sphere. Instead, in sometimes small but nevertheless often recognized and always significant ways, women shaped British arts, cultural identity, and public policy. Among those early influential volumes figured Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (2001), a collection Elizabeth Eger edited with Charlotte Grant, Clíona O’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton. In Bluestockings Displayed, Eger collects twelve essays on a similar topic, and those familiar with her prior work will not be disappointed. Eger’s previous collection included her own essay on the 1778 painting by Richard Samuel entitled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, which emblematizes the nation’s women intellectuals and artists as the triumph of advanced civilization. The current collection extends this inquiry by exploring the dynamics of visual representations, public image, and reputation in a culture with shifting, often even hostile, views regarding female agency in literature and the arts. Inspired by the 2008 National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings” that Eger co-curated with Lucy Peltz, the collection comprises the fruits of a conference associated with the exhibit. Together, its essays explore how visual culture shaped Enlightenment views on the relationship between virtue, patriotism, and female learning. [End Page 129] As one would expect of a book as engaged with the visual arts as with the literary, Bluestockings Displayed is illustrated with many of the prints and portraits that its contributors address. Unfortunately, all illustrations are in black and white, making detail difficult to discriminate in some prints, and leaving important background completely obscured in others. The exhibition catalog, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (2008), also by Eger, might usefully supplement, but that is a separate publication by a different press. Having invested in rich illustration, Cambridge might have taken the additional step of providing at least some of these images in color, especially in cases where the argument depends on details lost in the black-and-white renderings. Eger organizes the volume into three sections, beginning with five essays under “Portraits.” Spanning the years between Alexander Pope’s Epistle to a Lady (1743) and the early Victorian era, this section charts women’s efforts to represent themselves as respectable, even admirable, in the face of such visual and verbal derogation as Pope’s Epistle and the licentious satire of cartoonists like Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, Isaac Cruikshank, and others. Anne Mellor’s essay explores visual representations from the early years of the nineteenth century that combine eroticized femininity with moral propriety to contain public unease and depict female intellectual authority as compatible with Victorian respectability. Elizabeth Clery’s piece extends this argument with an overview of women authors who used paintings and prints, especially book frontispieces, to promote an image of virtuous femininity in an increasingly anonymous literary marketplace. Clare Barlow’s essay continues the exploration, analyzing Bluestocking portraits in the guise of mythological and historical figures as advocating female learning. In the only essay devoted to a woman visual artist, Anne Yarrington discusses the relationship between sculptor Anne Seymour Damer’s politics and her artistic fame. This section that opened with sentimentally erotic portraits of young women authors winds up with Devoney Looser’s essay confronting the ageism that often depicted elderly women as physically repulsive and forced older female intellectuals into self-representations of exceptional propriety and reserve. Part two on “Performance” opens with Joseph Roach arguing that soprano Elizabeth Linley, consigned to private concerts by her husband Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s ban on public performance, “recaptur[ed] her lost voice” in verse and “in the...

Religion, Security, Rights, the Individual and Rates of Exchange: Religion in Negotiation with British Public Policy in Prisons and the Military

The paper analyses research conducted by the Cardiff Centre for Chaplaincy Studies into chaplaincy in prisons in England and Wales and in the British Armed Forces. The research is interrogated to identify how religion is ‘formatted’ in those contexts. An analytical approach is developed from the work of Bourdieu, concerning the following: the interaction of the field of religion with the fields of criminal justice and the military, within the wider political field; the exchange of capital (especially symbolic and economic) involved in the field interaction; and the way in which religion is revalued in the exchange of capital. This analytical framework is applied, first, to show how the fields of criminal justice (in relation to prisons) and the military are constructed in interaction with a wider political context, with specific public policy areas relating to security and human rights, and in relation to different ways of constructing the individual. Secondly, the analysis investigates the distinct ways in which the development of multifaith chaplaincy has contributed to the symbolic capital of the two fields, demonstrating that this represents different revaluations of the contribution of the field of religion. Prison chaplaincy is shown to contribute to the balance between the primary security role of the prison and the need for prisons to be seen to be humane. Military chaplaincy is shown to be more directly aligned with the security role of the Armed Forces, symbolically underpinning military effectiveness and cohesion and enhancing the historically Christian ethos.

Ethics and the public interest

Since 1979, under governments of both major parties, the thrust of British public policy has been radically changed in the direction of neoliberal economics and the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM). This has had profound effects on the priorities that politicians and the officials who advise them are expected to pursue. The traditional public service values of equity, probity and integrity have been displaced by the business values of economy, efficiency and effectiveness – the ‘Three Es’ ( Hood, 1991 ). Many of the provisions and regulations that were designed to reduce risks of corrupt or otherwise improper behaviour were relaxed in favour of generating more entrepreneurial attitudes among public servants and recruiting entrepreneurial talent from the business world. The benefits of enterprise have been significant in terms of gains in innovation, efficiency and improved relations with the public; but on the other hand, corrupt, selfish and greedy behaviour by some politicians and public servants has seriously eroded public respect for politics and public administration alike. More generally, markets and their values have increasingly dominated political, economic and social discourses and decision making, with the result that markets are now used to determine outcomes that would formerly have been regarded as inappropriate for the application of market methods and which arguably are still inappropriate issues for markets alone to determine (Sandel, 2012). Hence a review of the ethical issues that underpin public policymaking, administration and management is urgently required. Michael Sandel (2010) has argued that we need to rethink the importance of justice and related values in our public life, albeit that we disagree among ourselves about many moral and religious issues: ‘A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society’ (Sandel, 2010: 269).

Decolonization of Psychiatric Public Policy in Jamaica

Involuntary commitment and custodialization were the principal tenets of British colonial public policy provisions for the management of the violent, disturbed mentally ill in Jamaica and the West Indies. Over the fifty years following Jamaica's political independence from Britain, a community engagement mental health programme has developed through a decolonization process that has negated involuntary certification, incarceration and custodialization, has promoted family therapy and short stay treatment in conventional primary and secondary care health facilities, and has promoted reliance on traditional and cultural therapies that have been extremely successful in the treatment of mental illness and the reduction of stigma in Jamaica. Collaborations involving The University of the West Indies, the Jamaican Ministry of Health and the Pan American Health Organization have been seminal in the development of the decolonizing of public policy initiatives, negating the effects of involuntary certification that had been imposed on the population by slavery and colonization. This collaboration also catalysed the psychiatric training of medical, nursing and mental health practitioners and the execution of community mental health policy in Jamaica.

EVALUATING THE BREADTH OF POLICY ENGAGEMENT BY ORGANIZED INTERESTS

This article probes the variation in the breadth of policy engagement among organized interests. The literature, heavily shaped by large‐n US studies of Washington and its lobbying system, suggests many reasons for organized interests to focus policy engagement relatively narrowly. This claim of policy specialization has been long repeated in the British public policy literature. The aim of this article is to empirically test the extent to which expectations of narrowed engagement hold in a UK context. This article uses a new Scottish dataset that tracks actual engagement by any organized interest on executive policy consultations over a 25‐year period. It tracks over 90,000 ‘mobilization events' by over 18,000 organizations in 1,690 distinct consultation issues across the entire Scottish policy system. In analysing these data, we concern ourselves with establishing: (1) the extent of generalized engagement; (2) the type of organized interests that are more or less general in their engagement; and (3) the extent to which a specialized style of policy engagement is on the increase over time. In the process, we develop measures that are appropriate for assessing breadth of engagement using issue‐based policy data.

Are some boundaries easier to bridge?

The impetus to work across boundaries is a longstanding theme in British public policy. Critical commentary has emerged from different perspectives, but has not provided empirically based analysis of joint working across different sectors and spheres of practice. In this article we present findings from an evaluation of joint working in the Supporting People Health Pilots. These raise questions about why some agencies – primarily in the voluntary sector – appeared to be more effective than others at working across boundaries. These questions and the broader implications of the findings for the voluntary sector are analysed.

The Construction of a ‘Population Problem’ in Colonial India 1919–1947

This article examines the construction of a ‘population problem’ among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's ‘population problem’ nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.

Foreign Policy Beliefs in Contemporary Britain: Structure and Relevance1

This paper examines the structure and domestic political relevance of foreign policy beliefs in contemporary Britain. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of data gathered in five national surveys conducted between May and September 2008 show that the British public's foreign policy beliefs are organized by two latent factors, which we label Liberal Internationalism and British Militarism. These factors closely resemble those reported in studies of the foreign policy beliefs of the American public. Analyses reveal significant covariation between the two foreign policy belief factors and voting intentions, as well as with partisanship and feelings about party leaders—key predictor variables in voting behavior models. These relationships remain significant in the presence of several controls, including measures of incumbent government performance in domestic and foreign policy domains. Demonstrating that foreign policy beliefs matter for the fates of political parties and their leaders helps to explain how public opinion in democratic politics affects the conduct of international relations.

Governing Irrationality, or a More Than Rational Government? Reflections on the Rescientisation of Decision Making in British Public Policy

It appears that recent debates within human geography, and the broader social sciences, concerning the more-than-rational constitution of human decision making are now being paralleled by changes in the ways in which public policy makers are conceiving of and addressing human behaviour. This paper focuses on the rise of so-called Behaviour Change policies in public policy in the UK. Behaviour Change policies draw on the behavioural insights being developed within the neuro-sciences, behavioural economics, and psychology. These new behavioural theories suggest not only that human decision making relies on a previously overlooked irrational component, but that the irrationality of decision making is sufficiently consistent to enable effective public policy intervention into the varied times and spaces that surround human decisions. This paper charts the emergence of Behaviour Change policies within a range of British public policy sectors, and the political and scientific antecedents of such policies. Ultimately, the paper develops a geographically informed, ethical critique of the contemporary Behaviour Change regime that is emerging in the UK. Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews with leading policy executives, and case studies that reflect the application of Behaviour Change policies on the design and constitution of British streets, the analysis claims that current strategies are predicated on a partial reading of new behavioural theories. We argue that this partial reading of human cognition is leading to the construction of public policies that seek to arbitrarily decouple the rational and emotional components of human decision making with deleterious social and political consequences.

Ethnic enclaves or middleman minority? Regional patterns of ethnic minority entrepreneurship in Britain

In public debate higher levels of self-employment among some ethnic communities are often celebrated as a manifestation of success. Regional economic development is a long-standing issue in British public policy, with the South-Eastern regions of England enjoying greater long-run prosperity than Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the other parts of England. The regional distribution of five entrepreneurial minorities in England and Wales is described. We test hypotheses derived from the middleman minority theory and the ethnic enclave model and find that self-employment in these groups is inversely related to minority share in the regional economically active population. The sectoral diversity of minority enterprises is positively related to their share in the regional economically active population.

Why Scottish ‘Personal Relations Theory’ Matters Politically

Recent British public policy has been substantially informed by a tradition of 'attachment theory' that sees the human psyche as innately disposed to intimate personal relationships. Some commentators have argued that the welfare state has found a new legitimation in such ideas: the family must be protected from the capitalist market so that it can foster the loving attachments essential to human well-being (and also, co-incidentally or not, to successful economic participation). Attachment theory owes a widely recognised debt to the work of Scottish 'object relations' theorists such as the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Ian D, Suttie (1889-1935) and the psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbaira (1889-1964), both of whom criticised Freudian theory, and argued for the innate sociability of the human personality. The work of Suttie and Fairbaira parallels that of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (18911976), who also argues for the primacy of interpersonal life. Over the last fifteen years or so, there has been a growing interest in the work of these figures, and a developing awareness of their similarities and influence upon each other. All three - Suttie, Fairbaira, and Macmurray - have come to be seen as part of a Scottish 'persons-in-relation' perspective (Kirkwood 2005) or 'personal relations theory' (Clarke 2006) substantially informed by the Scottish Christian tradition. However, the ideas of Suttie, Fairbairn, and Macmurray were for many years occluded by those of attachment theory, so that what is frequently lost in the 'new arguments' for comprehensive social security is the intellectual complexity of the earlier 'personal relations'

Geohazard information to meet the needs of the British public and government policy

Environmental information is increasingly valued and understood by government, commercial business and the general public. At the same time, the Environmental Information Regulations enable access to a huge amount of information, which may not be in a user-friendly format. Since 2000, the British Geological Survey has been developing nationwide geo-environmental datasets that identify the potential for subsidence and geochemical hazards. This information is provided as GIS datasets or in easy-to-use report format to meet the different needs of local and central government, commercial data providers and individuals. The information is geared to answer questions posed by the UK Planning Guidance, the EU Water Framework Directive and the UK Home Information Pack. New developments aim to provide information on groundwater flooding, soil erosion potential and mining hazards to meet growing concerns about the impact of climate change and in response to incoming mine waste regulations. The provision of digital geohazard information has enabled BGS to inform the British public and policy makers of potential hazards, and helped them to understand the relevance of environmental information to their lives.

“The law was actually drafted by us but the Government is to be congratulated on its wise actions”: British American Tobacco and public policy in Kenya

Background and objective: British American Tobacco (BAT) has historically enjoyed a monopoly position in Kenya. Analysis of recent tobacco control debates and a case study of BAT’s response to the...

German Philosophy and British Public Policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in Theory and Practice

The paper is premised on the well-recorded fact that R.B. Haldane, throughout his working life, remained fascinated with German idealist philosophy. The paper unravels Haldane’s own perception of the relation between his philosophical interests and his diverse policy-orientated work at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many commentators have noted this relation but often pass over it as a curious detail of his biography. The most basic tool his philosophy gave him was a way of analysing problems. This philosophical stance was not an ex post facto rationalisation but conversely was always his first thought on encountering a problem. To solve a policy problem one has to identify the leading ideas of that particular mode of human experience. Haldane believed that finding such rational principles underlying all forms of experience was the first duty of a politician, lawyer or civil servant. He contended that this painstaking ideational analysis would ultimately lead to the most effective policy solutions. The paper focuses first on Haldane’s initial encounter with German philosophical culture in both Edinburgh and Göttingen, second, it unpacks the key philosophical themes which characterize his approach, derived largely from his reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Thirdly, it turns - in the light of his philosophical beliefs - to his overt commitments to policy developments in the Edwardian new liberalism, military reform, administrative and civil service policy reorganisation, and finally his extensive work in education policy, particularly in the university sector.