British National Research Articles

Cryptographically Secure Private Record Linkage using Locality-Sensitive Hashing

Private record linkage (PRL) is the problem of identifying pairs of records that approximately match across datasets in a secure, privacy-preserving manner. Two-party PRL specifically allows each of the parties to obtain records from the other party, only given that each record matches with one of their own. The privacy goal is that no other information about the datasets should be released than the matching records. A fundamental challenge is not to leak information while at the same time not comparing all pairs of records. In plaintext record linkage this is done using a blocking strategy, e.g., locality-sensitive hashing. One recent approach proposed by He et al. (ACM CCS 2017) uses locality-sensitive hashing and then releases a provably differential private representation of the hash bins. However, differential privacy still leaks some, although provable bounded information and does not protect against attacks, such as property inference attacks. Another recent approach by Khurram and Kerschbaum (IEEE ICDE 2020) uses locality-preserving hashing and provides cryptographic security, i.e., it releases no information except the output. However, locality-preserving hash functions are much harder to construct than locality-sensitive hash functions and hence accuracy of this approach is limited, particularly on larger datasets. In this paper, we address the open problem of providing cryptographic security of PRL while using locality-sensitive hash functions. Using recent results in oblivious algorithms, we design a new cryptographically secure PRL with locality-sensitive hash functions. Our prototypical implementation can match 40000 records in the British National Library/Toronto Public Library and the North Carolina Voter Registry datasets with 99.3% and 99.9% accuracy, respectively, in less than an hour which is more than an order of magnitude faster than Khurram and Kerschbaum's work at a higher accuracy.

Lexical Demands of Academic Written English: From Students’ Assignments to Scholarly Publications

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which contained 2,761 student assignments, and the Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE) corpus which included 4,000 scholarly articles. Results from the analyses demonstrated significant differences in lexical difficulty between students’ assignments and scholarly publications. The proportion of academic vocabulary in written texts was also found to increase as the writers’ levels went up. Cross-discipline comparisons highlighted the difference in lexical difficulties between scientific disciplines.

A preliminary investigation of the acoustic factors impacting decision making in speaker attribution

Attributing utterances to speakers in a good quality recording of clear speech might seem to be a simple and straightforward task, yet transcribers have been shown to “regularly and obliviously get it wrong” (Love 2020: 156). This issue has received very limited attention, and our research focuses on the issue from a forensic linguistic perspective where attributing an utterance to a speaker in a forensic case could effectively be accusing them of having committed a crime. Literature on speaker attribution/recognitionnever shows 100% accuracy even in very good acoustic conditions, with marked drops in performance when features are masked (as they often are in forensic situations). In this preliminary study, five phonetically trained listeners transcribed an audio file of six people engaged ina panel discussion from television (we focus on audio only). The speech of two female speakers is correctly attributed in almost all cases, so we pay attention to the acoustic features of four male voices. Listeners werealmost never correct in their judgements about the exact number of speakers in the recording and made multiple attribution errors. We show that this is because of the fundamental nature of the speech acoustics; within-speaker variation is larger than between speaker variation for F0, intonational properties, and speech rhythm. Love, R. (2020). Overcoming challenges in corpus construction: The spoken British National Corpus 2020. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. New York: Routledge.

Antibiotic prescribing in remote versus face-to-face consultations for acute respiratory infections in primary care in England: an observational study using target maximum likelihood estimation

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an ongoing increase in the use of remote consultations in general practice in England. Although the evidence is limited, there are concerns that the increase in remote consultations could lead to more antibiotic prescribing. In this cohort study, we used patient-level primary care data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink to estimate the association between consultation mode (remote versus face-to-face) and antibiotic prescribing in England for acute respiratory infections (ARI) between April 2021 and March 2022. Eligibility criteria were applied at both practice-level and patient-level. 400 practices in England were sampled at random and then 600,000 patients were randomly sampled from the eligible patients (whose sex was recorded). Consultations for acute respiratory infections were identified. All antibiotic prescriptions were included, with the exception of antituberculosis drugs and antileprotic drugs, as identified through chapter 5.1 of the British National Formulary. The CPRD Aurum data was linked to the COVID-19 ONS infection survey by region. All analyses were done at the individual level. Repeated consultations from the same patient within 7 days were grouped together. We used targeted maximum likelihood estimation, a causal machine learning method with adjustment for infection type and patient-level, clinician-level and practice-level factors. There were 45,997 ARI consultations (34,555 unique patients) within the study period, of which 28,127 were remote and 17,870 were face-to-face. For children, 48% of consultations were remote and, for adults, 66% were remote. For children, 42% of remote and 43% of face-to-face consultations led to an antibiotic prescription; the equivalent values for adults were 52% and 42%, respectively. After adjustment with TMLE, adults with a remote consultation had 23% (odds ratio [OR] 1.23, 95% CI: 1.18-1.29) higher chance of being prescribed antibiotics than if they had been seen face-to-face. We found no significant association between consultation mode and antibiotic prescribing in children (OR 1.04 95% CI: 0.98-1.11). The higher rates of antibiotic prescribing in remote consultations for adults are cause for concern. We see no significant difference in antibiotic prescribing between consultation mode for children. These findings should inform antimicrobial stewardship activities for health-care professionals and policy makers. Future research should examine differences in guideline-compliance between remote and face-to-face consultations to understand the factors driving antibiotic prescribing in different consultation modes. None.

Developing and validating a mid-frequency word list for chemistry: a corpus-based approach using big data

Given the importance of specialized vocabulary in scientific communication and academic discourse, there is a growing need to create wordlists to address the vocabulary-learning needs of university students and researchers in different subject areas. The current study analyzed a corpus of chemistry research articles (with 278 million running words) to establish a mid-frequency vocabulary list for this field. Using frequency, range, and dispersion criteria, the study identified 560 lemmas in the fourth to the ninth British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) lists that provided 6.4% coverage of all words in the corpus. The list was validated using specialized and general corpora, and the results confirmed the value and relevance of the items for chemistry. Moreover, for using the list for pedagogical goals, the vocabulary items were divided into five bands based on their coverage and importance. The 100 words in the first band were the most important mid-frequent vocabulary in chemistry, as they provided 3.05% coverage. The study highlights the significant contribution of mid-frequency words in research articles and the findings have implications for using large corpora as a big data source in identifying specialized and field-specific vocabulary.

Celebrating the Ambivalent Britishness: Reading Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) from Bakhtin’s Carnival Theory

Small Island (2004) is British Jamaican writer Andrea Levy’s representative work. By focusing on two British White and Black couples’ experiences before and after WWII, the author reexamines the so-called canonical Britishness and subverts the myth of the British Empire. Based on Bakhtin’s carnival theory, this paper analyzes the process of the Windrush generation’s identity construction after the 1948 British Nationality Act. This paper argues that Small Island is a post-WWII carnival celebrating the ambivalent national identity wherein the traditional Britishness is challenged through the characters’ ridiculous experiences, the mocking language toward self and other, and their efforts into claiming space in Mother country. By doing so, the Windrush generation breaks the homogeneous national identity while endowing Britishness with new meanings and celebrating the forthcoming exclusive society.

Gender Discrimination in Job Titles in English Language: A Corpus-Based Critical Study

Males and females have the same rights as members of society but females are discriminated against in terms of job titles. Fairclough's three-dimensional model was used to identify, expose, and challenge the implicit ideologies behind the use of such job titles and pronouns used after these job titles. This research is a mixed method research that aims to analyze the use of male-representing, female-representing, and neutral job titles and the use of pronouns after the use of these job titles in the British National Corpus (BNC). 15 job titles were selected for the study. Only those job titles were selected for which female-representing and neutral job titles were available and that are more frequently used by the people. Sketch Engine was used to know the frequencies of these job titles. The frequencies of these job titles were compared to know what type of job titles are used more in the British National Corpus (BNC). The study showed that there is a big difference between the frequencies of male-representing and female-representing job titles and the frequency of male-specific pronouns is more than the frequency of female-specific pronouns after the use of male-oriented and female-oriented job titles and this leads to discrimination of females. It is suggested that job titles should be used appropriately so that no gender can be discriminated against.

ITutorGroup: A case study of covert native-speakerism underneath a social justice façade

<p>This article examines the covert native-speakerist strategies iTutorGroup utilizes to discriminate against teachers of nationalities the company appears to deem as undesired. Through content analysis of numerous job application submissions to iTutorGroup’s website, results show iTutorGroup’s automatic hiring process offers teachers of these nationalities a much lower potential wage and only a video-recorded asynchronous interview, if not complete refusal to an interview. In contrast, British, Australasian, and North American nationals are afforded a much higher potential wage as well as a one-on-one live interview. The company conceals these nuanced discriminatory strategies with a façade of equality since they are one of TESOL International Association’s Global Partners. As a Global Partner, iTutorGroup follows suit in pretending to uphold TESOL’s nondiscrimination policies.</p>

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

This article shows how the allegory of British-tiger rivalry became a distinct feature in 19th-century British imperial visual culture to imagined imperial attitudes over India. After the second Anglo-Mysore war (1799) between the East Indian Company and the Tipu Sultan, in 1808, a visual description of lion-tiger bloodshed was issued as a medal by the East India Company to reward its troops. Such a description shows a lion, representing the British nation’s suppression over a Bengal tiger, the royal emblem of Tipu Sultan. After this, the same imagery served to be imagined and visualised the British dominance and control over ruthless and unwilling India. Moreover, in such an allegory, a fiction of dead white women was added to invoke nationalism among Britons. This raises a feminist issue of how this fictional image of victimised women fulfils the British masculine agenda of imperialism and nationalism while the women remain deprived.

Large Language Models for Epidemiological Research via Automated Machine Learning: Case Study Using Data From the British National Child Development Study.

Large language models have had a huge impact on natural language processing (NLP) in recent years. However, their application in epidemiological research is still limited to the analysis of electronic health records and social media data. To demonstrate the potential of NLP beyond these domains, we aimed to develop prediction models based on texts collected from an epidemiological cohort and compare their performance to classical regression methods. We used data from the British National Child Development Study, where 10,567 children aged 11 years wrote essays about how they imagined themselves as 25-year-olds. Overall, 15% of the data set was set aside as a test set for performance evaluation. Pretrained language models were fine-tuned using AutoTrain (Hugging Face) to predict current reading comprehension score (range: 0-35) and future BMI and physical activity (active vs inactive) at the age of 33 years. We then compared their predictive performance (accuracy or discrimination) with linear and logistic regression models, including demographic and lifestyle factors of the parents and children from birth to the age of 11 years as predictors. NLP clearly outperformed linear regression when predicting reading comprehension scores (root mean square error: 3.89, 95% CI 3.74-4.05 for NLP vs 4.14, 95% CI 3.98-4.30 and 5.41, 95% CI 5.23-5.58 for regression models with and without general ability score as a predictor, respectively). Predictive performance for physical activity was similarly poor for the 2 methods (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve: 0.55, 95% CI 0.52-0.60 for both) but was slightly better than random assignment, whereas linear regression clearly outperformed the NLP approach when predicting BMI (root mean square error: 4.38, 95% CI 4.02-4.74 for NLP vs 3.85, 95% CI 3.54-4.16 for regression). The NLP approach did not perform better than simply assigning the mean BMI from the training set as a predictor. Our study demonstrated the potential of using large language models on text collected from epidemiological studies. The performance of the approach appeared to depend on how directly the topic of the text was related to the outcome. Open-ended questions specifically designed to capture certain health concepts and lived experiences in combination with NLP methods should receive more attention in future epidemiological studies.

A structured methodology for essential medicines lists and health emergency stockpiles: Experience with the Emergency Medicines Buffer Stock in the United Kingdom

IntroductionFormularies of essential medicines, such as Essential Medicines Lists (EMLs) and health emergency stockpiles, are intended to be always available, including in emergency situations, acting as important tools for access to medicines. The Emergency Medicines Buffer Stock (EMBS) in the United Kingdom (UK) was a stockpile of critical medicines managed by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). We propose a new methodology for selecting and including medicines in EMLs and health emergency stockpiles and empirically apply it for selecting medicines in the case of the UK EMBS. MethodsWe used Multi-Attribute Value Theory and Portfolio Decision Analysis to develop a three-phase methodological framework for medicines selection, involving: (i) the decision context definition and selection of evaluation criteria, (ii) the therapeutic area prioritisation, and (iii) the medicines value-for-money evaluation and product selection. The EMBS application took place in 2018–2019 and focused on therapeutic area prioritisation, involving primary data collection through expert interviews (n = 4), a workshop with DHSC decision-makers (n = 13), and an online survey with National Clinical Directors and relevant experts (n = 24). A Monte Carlo simulation supported therapeutic area prioritisation using the British National Formulary (BNF) classification. FindingsTwo criteria sets were selected for i) therapeutic area prioritisation, reflecting the value concerns of population need and shortage severity, and ii) medicines evaluation, reflecting magnitude of clinical benefit and supply vulnerability, among others.Primary evidence was collected for “national need” and “shortage severity”, based on which a “population health loss” index was developed. A total of 51 therapeutic areas were ranked using their index value while assessing the robustness of the ranking. The top ranked therapeutic area was antisecretory drugs and mucosal protectants, closely followed by diabetes drugs. ConclusionsThe methodological application generated a ranking of therapeutic areas based on expected “population health loss” index, while addressing evidence uncertainty. The methodology can be adapted for other EMLs and emergency stockpile contexts to inform medicines selection.

Statistical transformation of the population and social statistics system

This presentation describes the proposed population and social statistics system, built around the Dynamic Population Model (DPM). The current population estimation system relies on the census. This provides granular data every 10 years, but the quality of population estimates declines between census years. The new system will deliver high quality population statistics, every year.
 The DPM is a modelling approach which follows the cohort component method. It uses various data sources to measure population counts and components of population change, producing a coherent set of estimates. We use the DPM to produce admin-based population estimates for mid-year 2011 to 2022 for all local authorities in England and Wales. For international migration, we replace survey-based methods with administrative data. Rather than survey-based migration intentions, we estimate migration using observed activity.
 The Coronavirus pandemic underlined the need for more timely population estimates. The DPM allows us to publish early, provisional estimates which are confirmed as the data feeds being used mature. In February 2023 we published research statistics for 2011-2022 mid-year population estimates, four months ahead of the date scheduled for the publication of the equivalent national statistics. We demonstrated the need to incorporate into the model a robust coverage adjustment method. Research is currently under way to optimise the coverage adjustment data and methods.
 Our international migration estimates use different data sources and methods for each nationality grouping. We currently publish estimates on immigration, emigration and net migration for non-EU, EU and British nationals.
 Transformation of the population and social statistics system will produce more timely and coherent estimates to better meet user needs. Flexible by design, our system will be able to reliably adapt to changes in social behaviour, changes in the data available for estimation and changes in users’ statistical needs.

A tool for safer prescribing in vulnerable adults: the continuing development of the Medichec app and website.

Adverse effects are a common concern when prescribing and reviewing medication, particularly in vulnerable adults such as older people and those with intellectual disability. This paper describes the development of an app giving information on side-effects, called Medichec, and provides a description of the processes involved in its development and how drugs were rated for each side-effect. Medications with central anticholinergic action, dizziness, drowsiness, hyponatraemia, QTc prolongation, bleeding and constipation were identified using the British National Formulary (BNF) and frequency of occurrence of these effects was determined using the BNF, product information and electronic searches, including PubMed. Medications were rated using a traffic light system according to how commonly the adverse effect was known to occur or the severity of the effect. Medichec can facilitate access to side-effects information for multiple medications, aid clinical decision-making, optimise treatment and improve patient safety in vulnerable adults.

Contesting an Elastic Constitution: British Nationality and Protection in the Mandates

Current studies of British citizenship and nationality neglect the development of legal frameworks prior to the Second World War. A growing body of literature, invigorated by the 2017 Windrush scandal, charts the collapse of imperial citizenship as a dimension of British decolonisation from the 1960s onwards. In contrast, this article analyses how the British empire’s framework of national belonging became strained during the early 1920s, as Dominion leaders increasingly asserted their own sense of statehood and the League of Nations mandates system introduced new forms of imperial rule. The article considers General Jan Smuts’ decision to afford British naturalisation to 7,000 German colonists residing in the mandate of South-West Africa. League officials argued that Smuts’ scheme undermined the anti-annexationist ‘spirit’ of the Covenant, because mass naturalisation represented a practical declaration of South African sovereignty in the mandate. Meanwhile, British mandarins in the Home, Colonial, and Foreign Offices believed Smuts’ policy would destabilise the empire’s constitutional distinctions between territorial zones of formal and informal imperial governance. They also feared it would inspire subaltern inhabitants of other British-protected foreign spaces, especially mandatory Palestine and the Indian princely states, to similarly demand naturalisation in order to claim stronger legal rights for themselves as British subjects. Ultimately, Smuts leveraged his political stature to secure British and League consent for his plan. To maintain a façade of constitutional coherence and metropolitan control, Whitehall mandarins recast Smuts’ naturalisation scheme as an imperial anomaly. Non-European inhabitants of the British mandates, and the wider informal empire, were granted the uncodified, indeterminate status of ‘British Protected Persons’ (BPPs). Recent scholarship has recognised BPP status as a form of de facto statelessness. Inter-war policymakers in the Home and Colonial Offices drew similar parallels, this article shows.

Race, nation, empire? Historicising outward and inward-facing British nationalism

Brexit has continued to capture the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars, where it has been linked to the burgeoning debate on race and postcolonialism. This article adds to this scholarship by historicising the question of imperial nostalgia, which has been central to these intersecting literatures. It re-examines how influential theorists Hall and Gilroy linked the peculiarities of British national consciousness to traumas issuing from the loss of great power status. It emphasises two themes often lacking in recent accounts of Brexit nationalism: namely, the centrality of military mobilisation to national consciousness; and the unevenness between popular and elite sentiment with regards to the imperial dimension. In historicising themes of extroversion and introversion, it reconsiders the significant metamorphoses in post-Thatcherite British nationalism, which had centred on proclaiming a national renaissance founded in foreign policy successes, international moral leadership and a state-led consensus for rolling out globalisation worldwide. The research shows that revisionism about the British Empire played a significant role in foreign policy discourse across this period, as did pro-EU sentiment among the governing and ruling elite. It highlights the mechanisms which allowed UK foreign policy intellectuals to link the military roll-out of ‘postmodern’ social norms with the European project’s end goals. These findings help historically situate Brexit amid a succession of crises for the liberal global order. The research finds that, whereas Brexit appeared initially as a retreat or break from the UK’s post-Thatcherite ‘globalising’ nationalism, subsequent developments highlight significant continuities.

G. HICKES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GERMANIC STUDIES IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE END OF THE 17th AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 18th CENTURIES

The article analyses the contribution of G. Hickes (1642–1715), the author of an Anglo-Saxon grammar and Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, into the intellectual life of his time. Gathering around him the group of ‘Oxford saxonists’, he promoted the study of the AngloSaxon language and culture, the publication of texts in ancient Germanic languages and their translation into Late Modern English. In the context of the history of comparative linguistics, his works, in which Anglo-Saxon was considered alongside other Germanic languages, testify, in spite of their deficiencies, to the emergence in that early period of such important concepts as a parent language and a family tree. His achievements include the first description of Anglo-Saxon dialects and poetry. Taking into consideration Hickes’ attainments, one might find it strange that many of his contemporaries viewed his research and that of other Oxford saxonists in a critical light. The first reason lay in the intellectual climate of his time. In an age when most British intellectuals saw their historical roots in the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, the scholars suggested a principally different interpretation of the roots of the British nation. In fact, they contributed to the emergence of a new AngloSaxon identity. Secondly, their contemporaries found strange and pedantic their scholarly methods of textological analysis, which, actually, were quite close to modern ones, and the dry style of their works, the abundance of terms and complicated syntactic structures. The third explanation is the practical bias of most prescriptive grammars of the 18th century, which looked for criteria of correctness not in historical records, but in contemporary usage.

Adverse drug reactions and hospital admissions: Large case-control study of patients aged 65-100 years using linked English primary care and hospital data.

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are common and a leading cause of injury. However, information on ADR risks of individual medicines is often limited. The aim of this hypothesis-generating study was to assess the relative importance of ADR-related and emergency hospital admission for large group of medication classes. This study was a propensity-matched case-control study in English primary care. Data sources were Clinical Practice Research Databank and Aurum with longitudinal, anonymized, patient level electronic health records (EHRs) from English general practices linked to hospital records. Cases aged 65-100 with ADR-related or emergency hospital admission were matched to up to six controls by age, sex, morbidity and propensity scores for hospital admission risk. Medication groups with systemic administration as listed in the British National Formulary (used by prescribers for medication advice). Prescribing in the 84 days before the index date was assessed. Only medication groups with 50+ cases exposed were analysed. The outcomes of interest were ADR-related and emergency hospital admissions. Conditional logistic regression estimated odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). The overall population included 121 546 cases with an ADR-related and 849 769 cases with emergency hospital admission. The percentage of hospitalizations with an ADR-related code for admission diagnosis was 1.83% and 6.58% with an ADR-related code at any time during hospitalization. A total of 137 medication groups was included in the main ADR analyses. Of these, 13 (9.5%) had statistically non-significant adjusted ORs, 58 (42.3%) statistically significant ORs between 1.0 and 1.5, 37 (27.0%) between 1.5-2.0, 18 (13.1%) between 2.0-3.0 and 11 (8.0%) 3.0 or higher. Several classes of antibiotics (including penicillins) were among medicines with largest ORs. Evaluating the 14 medications most often associated with ADRs, a strong association was found between the number of these medicines and the risk of ADR-related hospital admission (adjusted OR of 7.53 (95% CI 7.15-7.93) for those exposed to 6+ of these medicines). There is a need for a regular systematic assessment of the harm-benefit ratio of medicines, harvesting the information in large healthcare databases and combining it with causality assessment of individual case histories.

Multifunctionality of the discourse marker okay in spoken English: A sociolinguistic examination linked to age

ABSTRACT The present study aims to examine the discourse marker (henceforth DM) okay by making use of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The objective is to investigate the multifunctional status of okay, and to examine sociolinguistic variation by taking age as the main variable. Many studies have been undertaken to describe the linguistic features of the DM okay and have demonstrated that it is susceptible to variation according to gender (Johannsen et al. 2015) and age (Stenström et al. 2002; Torgersen et al. 2011). On no occasions, however, have the multifunctional features of okay been described by accounting for sociolinguistic variation exhibited by people of all ages in spoken English. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap and examine the linguistic features and sociolinguistic variation exhibited by okay in contemporary English. The analysis reveals that there is variation in the use of okay among people of different ages and changes in apparent time. Specifically, signs of change concern the collocational profile and uses of the DM okay with the function of a response form, especially in the age group 0–14.

Generational Differences in Local Identities, Participation in Social Movements, and Migration Intention Among Hong Kong People

We adopt and extend Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty framework to investigate the associations between local identities, participation in social movements, and migration intention in Hong Kong. Data are from random sampled surveys collected from February to April 2021, June to August 2021, and March to June 2022 ( N = 3,003) from people in Hong Kong with the British National (Overseas) status. The findings show that the Hong Konger identity is associated with a higher level of participation in social movements and a stronger migration intention. There are few variations in these associations across the generations. Furthermore, participation in social movements is a strong push factor to migration, and no generational difference in the association is found. Overall, the findings imply that when political freedom is in decline, as in the case of Hong Kong, a local identity is associated with voicing for reforms. In the case of failed social movements, a local identity and previous experiences in voicing out are associated with a higher chance of exit to another country.

Labor, Democracy, and the Postcolonial State: Spaces of Union Organizing and the Duppy State in Britain and Trinidad

This article examines the democratic political praxes and contestations developed by trade unions in relations with the postcolonial state in both the Global North and South. Our work is informed by the scholarship of Richard Iton on the postcolonial duppy state and notions of the colonial past haunting the postcolonial present through the rearticulation of racialized, imperial labor regimes and relations in a postcolonial context. We engage with Trinidad’s Oilfields Workers Trade Union and the British National Union of Seamen to explore how this “haunting” was both contested and modulated by the labor activism of unions in both the former colony and metropole during the period of mid-twentieth-century decolonization. Empirically, we show how unionized workers sought to expand and entrench democratic cultures in opposition to the continued racialization of labor and the uneven power relations existent between labor, the state, and capital. This article responds to recent calls in labor geography to broaden the sites and subjects of study beyond workers in the Global North and introduces a study of the postcolonial state to claims to democratic politics in labor–state relations.