IN JULY 2021 the UK government published its Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy. The policy paper emerged out of the government's call for evidence on violence against women and girls in December 2020, February, and March 2021. Over 180,000 women responded to the call, and much of their testimony was harrowing. In prefacing the paper the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, noted ‘Many respondents felt that crimes like sexual harassment are almost an inevitable part of being a woman’. She lamented that certain male behaviours, which are taken to be ‘almost unconscious’ because they are ‘so habitual’, are borne and endured by women, shaping ‘the daily calculations women and girls adopt so they feel safer’.1 That this should be so was, as the Home Secretary rightly observed, intolerable. Yet, this outpouring of testimonies and the Home Secretary's own reflections on them—reflections marked by sadness and frustration—came more than a decade after the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government published the first Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls, introduced new offences for controlling or coercive behaviour, stalking, ‘revenge porn’ and ‘upskirting’, increased penalties for stalking and harassment, and signed the 2012 Council of Europe's Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence.2 This was an impressive list of accomplishments. But, with over 180,000 women giving testimony this year, testimonies that coincided with the shocking murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, and the Home Secretary's voicing of her own sadness and frustration at how women continue to be subject to violence, it appears the changes made over the decades have made little difference to women's lives. This point was stressed by Zoë Billingham in her Police Response to Violence Against Women and Girls: Final Inspection Report (September 2021) in which she highlighted how persistent ‘structural, strategic and tactical inconsistencies’ remained in the way violence against women and girls is treated, and that these inconsistencies needed to be addressed urgently if ‘inroads in tackling the deep-rooted problem of VAWG’ were to be made.3 To underscore the inconsistencies identified by Billingham, we might add the sharp rise in the number of cases of common assault involving domestic abuse that have been dropped: the perverse inverse correlation between the significant increase in allegations of common assault involving domestic abuse and the substantial fall in the number of charges being brought.4 Why, when the Home Secretary, Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, and a host of other individuals and institutions labour day and night to improve women's lives, does violence against women and girls persist? Why have we witnessed a truly appalling rise in abuse of women and girls during the current Covid-19 pandemic, a rise of abuse the UN has called a ‘shadow pandemic’, and what the mayor of London, Sadiq Kahn, has called an ‘epidemic’?5 Why do institutional structures that discriminate against women persist in our criminal justice and immigration systems?6 Why are certain male behaviours borne by women and ‘unconsciously’ accepted? What are the deep societal roots of these problems? These are profound questions in need of urgent answers. And they are the hard questions raised in this special issue on women and the politics of incivility and discrimination. The current Home Secretary has praised the Prime Minister and his predecessor, Theresa May, for making significant inroads in tackling violence against women and girls.7 Perplexingly, it is under the same prime ministers that we have witnessed shocking developments in how women are treated. For some time now, women in the UK—particularly women in Parliament and public life—have been subject to physical and verbal abuse, threatened with rape and death, and subject to merciless assaults in the press. Women's access to public life is increasingly restricted by these forms of intimidation. And it is a problem that has attracted growing academic attention.8 As Mona Lena Krook has argued, violence against women in politics is a phenomenon whose conceptual contours are only now starting to be more clearly defined. It is a ‘problem with no name’ and of many dimensions. It is a problem in which ‘some women normalize violence as part of the political game’; a problem in which some women ‘recognize that violence is not an acceptable cost of political engagement’ but ‘remain quiet to protect their political careers and/or their political parties’; a problem that sees many women remaining silent in order ‘to avoid scorn or blame from others for purportedly bringing the abuse upon themselves’.9 It is a problem fundamentally damaging to our democracy. In an important study on the 2019 election for The Constitution Unit, Sophia Collignon observed that ‘the abuse suffered by women candidates is often politically motivated, and often aims to prevent them from reaching office by means of intimidation’.10 This alarming observation is borne out by research for the Fawcett Society. It found that in 2019, 59 per cent of women surveyed said they would not stand as an MP. Today that figure has risen to 74 per cent. Almost 70 per cent of respondents cited abuse or harassment as a reason for not pursuing a career in politics.11 Intimidation, as these findings show, clearly works. When it comes to women participating in the UK Parliament and public life, it is fair to say that they are subject to a form of ‘cancel culture’ in which their very presence—a limited presence at that—in the public sphere is being ‘cancelled’. How is it possible that in a society which prides itself on politeness, fair play, and civility—a concept which is no longer the virtue it was once understood to be—women in public life should be treated in this way?12 Clearly, men in British public life must bear some responsibility for this appalling situation. The UK's Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who in the words of Priti Patel, ‘ensured [London] became the first major city in the world to launch a comprehensive violence against women and girls strategy’, never raised his voice in opposition to the attacks and threats made against female MPs, justices, lawyers, journalists and activists, or came to these women's defence.13 He made no public protest when Gina Miller faced daily death threats, or when Supreme Court Justice, Lady Hale, was subject to the most horrendous abuse on social media and in the press. He finally voiced indignation at violence against women and girls after the conviction of Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard and the shocking revelations of his crime. Does the Prime Minister and other senior male public figures believe that attacks against female MPs, justices, journalists, and activists are somehow different from violence against women and girls? Do these attacks and the uncivil treatment, verbal abuse and belittling of women in public life, lie in a different, inferior, and in some way more tolerable, category from violence against women and girls in private life? Are they an acceptable part of the ‘rough and tumble’ of politics, an ‘unconscious’ and ‘habitual’ feature of political life? Female MPs from the BAME community, such as Diane Abbot, are subject to the most frightful forms of online abuse and threatening posts; MPs who were loyal, dedicated and long-serving members of established political parties, such as Heidi Allen, Nicky Morgan, Amber Rudd and Anna Soubry, have left their political homes and politics altogether out of fear and sheer emotional exhaustion. Is all this merely the consequence of a vigorous democracy whose heated atmosphere is not a place for ‘snowflakes’? When female MPs are forced to withdraw from political events out of fear for their safety, as was the case most recently with Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, should we suppose that these women are not tough enough for the rigours of the ‘cut and thrust’ of politics? Or must we conclude that our politics, like our streets, are not safe for women? Jo Cox's murder in June 2016 united parliamentarians and the public in their shock and dismay. Cox was murdered and her assistant assaulted in front of a public library, in a public space, while performing their public duties. If ever there was an example of how the abuse and violence against women in public life is no mere matter of the ‘collateral damage’ of an animated democracy and vigorous debate, this must be it. If parliamentarians and the public were united in their outrage and dismay then, and are united now in their outrage to the many death and rape threats, hate mail, verbal abuse and online trolling that women in public life are subject to, why does it continue? Why has it worsened? These questions motivated the May 2021 roundtable and workshop on Women and the Politics of Civility/Incivility in Parliament and Public Life at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Maison Française d'Oxford. The opening roundtable, which brought together political theorists, practitioners and activists, began with a keynote address by Dame Laura Cox and was moderated by Professor Elizabeth Frazer, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. The papers delivered at that the workshop and Dame Laura Cox's keynote make up this special issue. While the subject at the heart of the roundtable and workshop has long been with us, it was the worsening of the condition of women in public life since 2016 that was the catalyst for the event. The Brexit campaign and post-referendum debates were, as everyone remembers, vituperative and ill-tempered. Brexit unleashed many demons that shook many people's faith in the norms of civility that frame rational and civilised debate in Parliament and public life. It caused people to wonder whether those norms were never more than superficial conventions that lent a veneer of civility to a form of politics that was hostile to women, a veneer that in the heat of debate was all too easily seared away. Would people be wrong to conclude, with Mary Wollstonecraft, that the political and social conventions of ‘polished manners’ that govern modes of address and behaviour in Parliament and other public institutions, ‘rendered vice more dangerous, by concealing its deformity under gay ornamental drapery’?14 Or had the rules of civility—which once fulfilled a useful purpose—now in this age of anger come to the end of their useful life? The consensual observation of a ‘crisis of civility’ was strikingly illustrated in the UK by the Brexit debates.15 We might also recall earlier debates in British parliamentary life about engaging more women MPs, on female representation in political parties, or organisational matters of the House of Commons and House of Lords—such as late-night sittings and flexible working hours, trying to convert Parliament's shooting range into a crèche, or altering the macho culture of parliamentary bars and restaurants—debates that remain ongoing in Parliament and wider society.16 Perhaps the fragility of these rules of civility pointed to a more fundamental problem that modern-day republics such as the United States, France and Italy share with the UK: the power imbalance of misogyny that women have always had to struggle against, the injustice of, what Caroline Criado Perez has called, ‘the myth of male universality’?17 What is clear is that any faith we might have had in civility gave way to serious apprehension, fear that UK politics was coarsening and—as in the US, France, and Italy—descending into a dystopian world in which political opponents were besmirched, denigrated, ritually humiliated, verbally, and physically, abused: silenced. The silencing of women is particularly shocking and reveals the inadequacy of norms of civility in disputatious times. The impact of incivility, of misogynistic abuse, and finally of violence against women, is profound. And this must cause us to pause, to reflect, to act. To replace the ‘male-unless-otherwise indicated’ kind of politics we are subject to now with the kind of inclusive and caring politics that comes from when we, in Criado Perez's words, cease to frame women ‘to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable’.18 It was this imperative to pause and to reflect that motivated the organisers and contributors to this special issue of The Political Quarterly. When Criado Perez argues that our society, culture, and politics must cease in everyday matters, such as the collection of data, to frame women ‘to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable’, she is doubly right. And this is particularly true of how our politics treats women. In her recent Journal of Politics article, Sandra Håkansson noted that a good deal of political science literature, and the legislative agenda of many states, has dealt with parity in representation. The questions of women's uncivil treatment, abuse and intimidation receive significantly less treatment, but these questions have a direct bearing on parity in representation. As she points out, ‘political gender equality is not guaranteed by parity in positions of power or influence over policy: equally central are the conditions under which politicians work. Being able to carry out political functions free from fear of violence and threats is a fundamental prerequisite for political representation’, and ‘political violence seems to be targeting women more intensively than men, hence posing a severe yet still largely understudied obstacle to political gender equality’.19 Håkansson's research goes beyond important recent studies on the gendered nature of political institutions and their connection with female parliamentarians' experiences of belittlement, micro-aggressions and the more macro-aggressions of harassment, intimidation and violence.20 And it connects with and confirms the findings of work done by Gabrielle Bardall, Elin Bjarnegård, and Jennifer Piscopo.21 In summarising her findings, Håkansson notes worryingly that ‘there is a substantial gender gap in violence exposure among top politicians … that the higher the level of power, the greater the gender gap in violence exposure’, ‘that women are penalised more than men for substantively representing minorities’ and that ‘visibility in media is more highly correlated with violence for female politicians than male’.22 It appears that the greater the inroads women parliamentarians make in challenging and altering established power structures, and the higher the visibility both of those structures and women's inroads in changing them, the more women end up being subject to more aggression, intimidation, and violence. Why? One recent and common refrain in answer to that question, and in relation to norms of civility, is how social media have appeared to exacerbate uncivil and abusive treatment of women in Parliament and the public sphere. This is particularly true of Twitter and Instagram, but it is also true of other social media.23 Social media have made access to the public sphere easier and more immediate, and consequently have both enlarged the numbers of people participating in the public sphere, and the sphere itself. As a recent Amnesty International report on Twitter noted: ‘the very nature of Twitter encourages users to have public conversations and share their thoughts with others (often strangers) on the platform, meaning that users arguably most benefit from Twitter when they are able to participate in discussions openly. In fact, Twitter's ability to provide ‘up-to-the-minute reactions’ means that public figures are able to bypass traditional media outlets and engage directly with their audiences'.24 MPs, Parliament, public institutions and media outlets all have webpages, email addresses, and Twitter accounts, giving individuals unprecedented access to parliamentarians and officials. This ease and immediacy compress the distance between MPs and voters, thereby stripping away a sociopolitical organisation of rank and accompanying deferential practices. This, depending on one's opinion, may or may not be a good thing. However one judges these changes, they come with consequences. First, this erosion of rank and deference is accelerated by social media through an apparent ease of communication that causes individuals to feel less and less distance between themselves and their elected or appointed officials. Social media such as Twitter and Instagram limit users to a small number of characters, which cannot support nuanced and sophisticated communication. Since the point of Twitter and Instagram is to accelerate and proliferate the transmission of bite-sized pieces of information, they encourage more emotional responses and consciously exclude the complex and even not so complex forms of etiquette and polite address that sustain civil conversation. Second, these emotional responses and less formal modes of address increasingly become the norm and are shared by elected officials and their electorates. This further shrinks the instances of deferential and polite address. Third, as William Davies has shown, the immediacy of communication created by social media has resulted in an important shift in politics, one in which power, which involved ‘the capacity to organise large numbers of people, using rules, infrastructures and leaders … the careful assembly of political associations and hierarchies’, has increasingly given way to violence—at least to emotional responses and post-truth narratives, at the expense of rational and civil behaviour.25 Drawing on Hannah Arendt's classic study On Violence, Davies contends that power ‘has a constructive quality’, whereas violence ‘doesn't build anything, but simply exploits whatever opportunities are at hand’.26 The assembling, constitutive, ordering, and ranking features of what is yielded by power, are increasingly effaced by the proximity of virtual, online, social interaction offered by social media. The consequence is a shift away from elaborate construction and the accompanying polite conversation and modes of address that, in a non-sexist form, encourage constructive dialogue toward unscrupulous exploitation of opportunities: a shift away from power and its coupling with civility to incivility and violence. This is the dark consequence of what Davies calls the ‘democracy of feeling’. And this nourishes itself. The ordered ranks and structures of associative life, with their rules of conduct, give way to a more amorphous, indistinct, sentiment of group or crowd attachment. And here is the paradox, for just as social media appear to make democracies more inclusive by giving individuals greater access to the public sphere, they may also make democracies more tribal, more exclusive, more ruthless, and more volatile. To add to the paradox, the UK government's response to this problem is to apply its own form of discipline and punishment through the introduction of new and stronger penalties to stem this violence, while neglecting the more fundamental cultural and educational changes that are necessary to foster a society of inclusivity, sensitivity and respect. Only through engaging in making these more fundamental changes will we be able to rethink and refashion, in a genuinely egalitarian and inclusive manner, modes of address that support the kind of polite conversation that is the quintessence of a vibrant and flourishing democracy and that can re-engage a citizen body that is increasingly disenchanted, alienated and disengaged. It might, then, seem paradoxical that this special issue should begin with Laura Cox's impassioned contribution. Cox's ‘A woman's place is in the House: reclaiming civility, tolerance and respect in political life’ would be wrongly interpreted if it were read as an inflamed piece of writing. Rather, Cox, a former Justice of the High Court and the chairwoman of the ground-breaking Independent Inquiry into the Bullying and Harassment of House of Commons Staff, which published its conclusions in 2018, makes a compelling case for communication, debate and the exchange of views: the sustaining and nourishing of the art of effective communication, by which she means, listening and reflecting as well as speaking. While Cox keenly believes that the traditional, adversarial approach of the British judicial system and parliamentary debate is, when conducted properly and fairly through its judicious deployment of careful and probing cross examination and informed productive argument, an excellent way of getting to the truth, she highlights how this approach is being rapidly eroded, and that women are suffering most from this collapse of civility. Cox observes how in this world of instant communication ‘where everyone can shout at everyone else’, ‘there are few, if any rules of engagement … no filtering or editing process and certainly no time for reflection, or for empathy with someone advancing an opposite point of view’. The effect of this is, as she notes, corrosive for our institutions of public life. In Cox's words, ‘what is happening online seems to me to be spreading to conduct offline, in our work or social settings and, I believe, in public life too in an era when many MPs are moving constantly between Twitter posts, debates in the Chamber, and back again’. The effect on our politics and political institutions is the displacement of civility and willingness to compromise with, in her words, ‘anger and incivility cascading down from central government’. The effect is devastating, for this loss of civility and spirit of compromise fuels a politics that has become increasingly misogynistic, lending credibility to macho behaviour and posturing that marks our political debates, and thereby compounding longstanding problems encountered by women in public life. For, as Cox observes, women in public life have borne the brunt of an upsurge of abuse, intimidation and assault and the consequences for our democracy are severe. As Cox notes, in a 2016 report from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, these forms of abuse, intimidation and violence impede women parliamentarians from doing their work and dissuade women generally from engaging in politics.27 Responding to the increasing exclusion of women from Parliament and public life is imperative and urgent. While Cox notes that the recommendations made in her October 2018 report were all accepted and implemented, it took two years for this to happen. The pace of change was slow, and the procedural changes made are but a first step. What needs to happen now, as Cox outlines, is for individual politicians and Parliament as a whole to set an example to the wider society. She makes several recommendations, from increasing the number of women in political party leadership and decision-making positions, through to more rigorous parliamentary procedures to address bullying and harassment and eradicate sexist behaviour. And she makes an emotional plea to politicians to re-think the conduct of parliamentary debates and their own use of language, to alter our political institutions and culture to make them inclusive places of constructive dialogue. Cox's plea for a less adversarial and more constructive form of debate is the theme of Deborah Cameron's article, ‘Women, civility and the language of politics: realities and representations’. In addressing the issue of the under-representation of women in political life, Cameron questions the widespread belief that women are alienated and disadvantaged by the competitive, adversarial and frequently uncivil style of speech which dominates much political discourse. In contrast to this aggressive and adversarial male politics, many believe that women's style of address is characterised by an avoidance of conflict and affirmation of cooperation and consensus-seeking. Cameron critically examines the thesis that women's preferred style of speech, which is at odds with the prevailing male dominated norm, makes a valuable contribution to democratic political discourse and may be better suited to the demands of modern political leadership than the traditional male form. She shows through her own empirical research and other studies of political discourse that, ‘women do not differ significantly from men in their use or avoidance of adversarial tactics’, and highlights that it is contextual factors that ‘have a greater influence on speech-style than the speaker's gender in and of itself’. But the fact that women are perceived to have a different speech-style is itself a gender stereotyping in which, as Cameron observes, ‘women are routinely held to higher standards of civility than men, because the avoidance of incivility is part of the definition of socially acceptable femininity’. And this puts women at a distinct disadvantage to men, for they are ‘expected both to show more respect for others’ speaking rights and to display a higher level of tolerance for infringements of their own rights’. Cameron, like Laura Cox, rejects the exclusive requirement of women to model a ‘kinder, gentler’ politics. As she demonstrates, this requirement results in women being sanctioned more harshly than men for deviations from that norm. And this results in women being relegating to the margins of political life, while men continue to occupy the centre. Rather, it is the male norm that must change. Collignon, Campbell, and Rüdig's article, ‘The gendered harassment of parliamentary candidates in the UK’, draws on unique empirical data from the Representative Audit of Britain surveys (2015–2019) to explore the role gender played in the harassment of candidates during the 2017 and 2019 election campaigns. In a similar way to Sarah Childs and Melanie Hughes, the authors use the intersectional approach to compare incivility towards women with attitudes towards ethnic minorities.28 Their findings suggest, worryingly, that incidents of harassment, abuse and intimidation are getting worse for candidates in general, suggesting a general coarsening of Britain's political culture. More important, they show that women are suffering from harassment, abuse and intimidation far more than men, with three in every four women experiencing some levels of fear while campaigning, and that this is worse for ethnic minority women. As Collignon, Campbell and Rüdig note, the silencing of women candidates and the suppression of women's full political participation that comes from harassment, abuse and intimidation, represents a reversal of many of the gains made by women over the last decades, and a dramatic shrinking of the representational horizons of Britain's political elites. This narrowing of representational horizons is the theme of Eve Gianoncelli's ‘Antifeminists, conservative women intellectuals, and the rhetoric of reaction’. Gianoncelli takes a different approach to examining the question of misogyny in Parliament and public life. Instead of focussing on men's attitudes and discourses toward women and LGBTQI+ issues, she analyses what she calls the antifeminist conservative women intellectual discourse. Her article identifies three types of antifeminist conservative discourse that stem from what she categorises as arguments about victimhood, conflation and fear. She shows how these types of discourse enrich a rhetoric of reaction by presenting men as victims of a ‘feminisation’ of political and social life. Her article suggests that women are not only the targets, but also the ‘perpetrators’ of incivility and that within the logic of this discourse, women's victimisation has been wielded as a powerful uncivil weapon against men, and incivility against women should not necessarily be understood as leading to their victimisation. Achieving the kind of kinder and gentler model of politics advocated by Cox, Cameron, Collignon and Childs, as Smith and Higgins reveal in their ‘Mute force and ignorance: incivility and gender in Scotland’, will be long and difficult. Smith and Higgins focus on the complex relationship between civility and gender in Scottish politics, and their article examines the apparent rise in intemperate political discourse which was amplified by social media and the divisiveness of Scottish independence, alongside how gender has been represented in Scottish politics. They show, through an examination of the discussion surrounding an outburst by an MSP during a Zoom meeting of the Scottish Parliament's Equalities and Human Rights Committee, how incivility has served as a tool, a weapon even, in the hands of a category of male politicians who can then be identified as ‘angry populists’. They show how incivility has become a means for the development of a new Scottish political style, combining ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘exasperated spontaneity’, and that this has emerged as a reaction to the feminisation of Scottish political leadership. Following on from Cameron and Cox, Gillian Peele's ‘Women and civility in British politics: reflections on a changing environment’ enumerates the effects of abuse and intimidation on MPs and candidates of political parties, but focusses on the mechanisms for controlling such behaviour. Peele signals that whereas a great deal of attention has been paid to institutional, procedural and the political elite-behavioural aspects of sustaining the democratic values of civility, public-spiritedness, respect, open and honest deliberation and courteousness, equally important to crafting the quality of our democracy is a detailed consideration of the behaviour of the general public. The values of, and attitudes toward, civility, public-spiritedness, respect, honest and constructive deliberation, cannot be created and sustained, much less imposed, by political elites alone; they must be part of the wider political and civic culture, developed and nourished in citizens’ attitudes and deliberations. In short, as Peele argues: ‘a vibrant democracy requires some ground rules about how political debate is conducted, institutions that sustain and promote those rules, and a wider public culture that promotes values of moderation and the virtues that foster an environment of civility’. Peele's focus is on civility in the wider political culture of the United Kingdom. She explores the erosion of civility and possible short- and long-term solutions to arrest and reverse this development. Some of these would involve monitoring and enforcing rules on language and behaviour in political and social life. Longer-term solutions, she suggests, encompass primary and secondary education, and awareness raising about respect for others, such as targeted training inside institutions such as local government and Parliament. Harriet Wistrich's ‘Misogyny in the criminal justice system’ and Zrinka Bralo's ‘Migrant and refugee women in the hostile environment immigration system: deliberately silenced and preferably unheard’ expose the consequences, the lived experience in the lives of ‘ordinary’ women, of a culture of incivility that increasingly marks our political institutions and wider culture. Whether it is the aggressive statements of politicians such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or the seemingly ‘innocent’, ‘jokey’ asides made by less well-known politicians, what both these pieces show in vivid and stark terms are the ‘real-life’ consequences of this kind of behaviour. As incivility becomes a more common feature of our political life, its corrosive effects on the wider society become more apparent, more severe, cruel and brutal, reflecting back on to politics itself. What Wistrich's and Bralo's articles both show is the extent to which misogyny, in dominating our political life, results, as Wistrich notes, in legislative blind spots, an absence of or deficiency in laws, regulations and institutions that protect women from psychological, mental and physical abuse. These legislative blind-spots and deficiencies in law are starkly highlighted in Bralo's contribution, where she shows how abuse, intimidation and violence have become inevitable and well-known consequences of the UK's ‘hostile immigration environment’. Might this official designation and the policy to which it refers, which exposes refugees, particularly women and children, to the depredations of a capricious, arbitrary and vengeful atmosphere, be a logical consequence of a political culture that, in being coarsened by incivility, has become discriminatory? While women have made great strides in transforming political life in the UK, what the articles in this collection show is just how fragile these gains are and how much more needs to be done. Fashioning an inclusive, cooperative, and public-spirited political culture, a culture in which women are treated as equal partners, is a most urgent task in this era of anger and political disengagement. It is our earnest hope that the reflections contained here go some way to making a modest contribution to that task. The roundtable and workshop received generous financial support from Worcester College under its ‘Community, Equality, and Decolonisation’ programme, the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung, the Maison Française d'Oxford, the European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford, and The Political Quarterly. Agnès Alexandre-Collier is Professor of British Politics, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Dijon. Michael Drolet is Senior Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought, Worcester College, University of Oxford.