Life In England Research Articles

The Impact of the Brexit on the Living Standards and Quality of Life in Britain

The Object of the Study. Living standards and quality of life of the population in Great Britain. The Subject of the Study. The Brexit. The Purpose of the Study is exposing the impact of the Brexit on the living standards and quality of life in the country. The Main Provisions of the Article. Following a June 2016 referendum on continued European Union membership in which 52% voted to leave and 48% voted to stay the UK government announced the country's withdrawal from the EC (Brexit). In March 2017 it formally began the withdrawal process. The withdrawal was delayed by deadlock in the UK parliament. Having failed to get her agreement with the EC approved, Theresa May resigned as Prime Minister in July 2019 and was succeeded by Boris Johnson, an active supporter of the Brexit. An early general election was then held on 12 December. The Conservatives won a large majority. As a result, the parliament ratified the withdrawal agreement, and the UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020. This began a transition period that is set to end on 31 December 2020, during which the UK and EU will negotiate their future relationship. The first round of negotiations between London and Brussels began in March 2020. The author investigates the consequences of the withdrawal of Great Britain from the EC on the living standards and quality of life, economic situation, labour market, social policy of the government. in this country. It analyzes on the impact of the Brexit on the major elements of human capital: education, science, health, living conditions, ecology. It found that short-term forecasts of what would happen immediately after the Brexit referendum were too pessimistic. Nowadays it is very difficult to give an accurate estimate of the future effect of the Brexit on cost of living in Great Britain – many essential issues in the relations between the UK and the EC remain open. Besides, the coronavirus crisis and lockdown measures may cause the grave damage to growth and jobs. Much evidence shows that in the medium- and long-term leaving the European Union damage the British economy and thus reduce the UK's real per-capita income level and may adversely affect jobs and earnings, income and wealth, life expectancy, education and skills, academic research, health status, environmental quality and subjective well-being in the UK. Finally, the author analyses the impact on the economic and social life in Great Britain of different Brexit scenarios after the end of the transition period. The consequences will differ sharply depending on whether the UK does a Soft or Hard (no deal) Brexit.

Anti-racist feminism: engaging with the past

Two landmark books, originally published during the same era of struggle in the UK, have been republished in 2018: Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain and Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain. These books make the history of anti-racism in the UK – and the role of black and Asian women within this that is so often overlooked – accessible to a broad audience and give context to the gendered racism and racialised patriarchies that persist today. Reviewing these reissued texts, the author argues that the UK’s radical history is a powerful tool that can reactivate anti-racist feminism both locally and internationally, pointing to the continued fight to retain BAME domestic violence refuges in the face of austerity cuts in the UK and the unique global solidarity that is coming to the fore as an emboldened far Right attacks women’s rights internationally.

Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit, by Jim Tomlinson

Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit, by Jim Tomlinson

‘Each one teach one’ visualising black intellectual life in Handsworth beyond the epistemology of ‘white sociology’

ABSTRACTHandsworth, a suburb in north-west Birmingham, became an important generative epistemic location that produced a number of contested discourses on race and racism in Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s. Using archival sources, this article will focus on Handsworth as an important epistemic space where white sociological studies on ‘race relations’ converged and diverged with the counter-hegemonic political activism of the African Caribbean Self-Help Organisation (ACSHO). This group of young Black working class Pan-Africanists in Handsworth were the coordinating committee for a national delegation of activists who attended the Sixth Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1974. Their activism in Handsworth was further captured by the photographer, Vanley Burke. The photography of Burke and his archive not only engages with the politics of creating alternative sites of knowledge production, they also enable us to map, trace and reconstruct some of these important sites of Black intellectual life in Britain.

Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit. By Jim Tomlinson. Oxford University Press. 2017. xiii + 273pp. £60.00.

Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit. By Jim Tomlinson. Oxford University Press. 2017. xiii + 273pp. £60.00.

Using the Mass Observation Project: A Case Study in the Practice of Reusing Data

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 to collect subjective, qualitative data on everyday life in Britain, and has continued to record the ordinary and the everyday ever since. Mass Observation’s purpose has always been to make the data it collects available to a range of disciplines to apply their own methodological approaches upon, resulting in data that can be reused within different projects and disciplines. This paper will use Mass Observation as a case study to illustrate how a sociological shift in attitude towards subjective data has played out in the use of a dataset traditionally viewed as a historical archive. I will review how the data itself is used to define and design methods of analysis, examining the epistemological implications of this approach to research design and the new dimension to the researcher-data subject relationship that is introduced. I will conclude by suggesting that research using Mass Observation exemplifies the methodological opportunities and insights that can be gained by adopting a broader, multi-disciplinary research approach to reusing data.

Melancholy Consequences: Britain's Long Relationship with Agricultural Chemicals Since the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Abstract Chemicals used to control agricultural diseases and pests have formed a significant aspect of rural life in Britain since at least the mid-eighteenth century. This paper argues that agricultural chemicals have long been subject to public health and environmental concern. Harnessing agricultural textbooks, periodicals and newspaper reports, this paper charts the use of arsenic and copper sulphate as means of preventing fungal disease in wheat over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this time the dangers and benefits associated with chemical seed steeps - a mixture of water with arsenic or copper sulphate in which seeds were immersed - were thoroughly explored: landowners and agricultural improvers released their own recipes, suggested alternative remedies for fungal disease and even carried out crop trials to test the efficiency of chemical preventatives. Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, seed steeps had become an issue of public health and government concern, as noxious substances poisoned game birds intended for human consumption. Embracing a 'long-run' history of agricultural chemicals enriches current debates on the use, regulation and impact of these products.

Jim Tomlinson. Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 273. $81 (cloth).

Jim Tomlinson. Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 273. $81 (cloth). - Volume 58 Issue 1

Black Jokes, White Humour: Africans in English Caricature, 1769–1819, by Temi Odumosu

Temi Odumosu has produced a powerful, incisive and vital contribution to a desperately under-populated field. While the few extant modern histories of Africans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain all acknowledge the significance of visual representations in constructing and reflecting popular racial thought, this is the first monograph since David Dabydeen’s classic Hogarth’s Blacks (1985) to be dedicated to the image of the African in satirical and ‘humorous’ prints. At once a focused study of representations of black people during the ‘golden age’ of political caricature, and a broader reconsideration of ‘the making and establishment of popular ethnic notions in Britain’ (p. 200), this book is necessary reading for all scholars of the history of race and the African diaspora. Caricature in this period depended upon layers of intertextual references and satirical allusions to contemporary events; to ‘get the joke’, audiences are required to have knowledge of the politics, scandals and rumours of the day. Odumosu’s ‘insistently archival approach’ (p. 22) provides the contextual keys needed to unlock the 100-plus images reproduced here, along with clear-sighted analysis that relates how the inclusion of, or focus on, the black body operated in dialogue with unstable categories of race, gender and nation. This historically situated approach makes this book especially useful for teaching. But while due weight is given to the well-known ‘double bind of prejudice and curiosity’ (p. 22) informing slavery-era caricatures, the central contention of this book is much more original. Essentially, Odumosu argues, these images, while sometimes deeply racist, were unique and signified ‘radical social change’ (p. 155) in that they cast Africans for the first time as self-directing agents in the levelling project of political satire. Comic artists, moreover, picked up on ‘the peculiar hypocrisy and distastefulness of colonial servitude … and they dared to signal the abuse, exploitation and perversion that framed African lives in Britain, even if they sometimes revelled in it’ (p. 203).

Domesticating Madrasa Education

This paper presents findings of a study exploring the attitudes of Muslim youth in relation to their madrasa education and its influence on their lives. It further explores the flexibility of madrasas to adapt and reform against a backdrop of changing socio-political landscape scrutinising and planning for how diverse Muslim faith groups use their educational spaces in absentia of Muslim youth voices. A mixed method approach was used combining data from 40 questionnaires and nine semi-structured small-group interviews collected through an independent measures design involving two groups of participants, current and ex-madrasa pupils, aged 11 – 19. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the data reveals the more recent teaching experiences of current madrasa pupils elicit a more positive response than the ex-pupils. Muslim youth argue that whilst madrasas play an important role in their early socialisation to God, Qur’an and Islam they are only now beginning to contextualise Islamic education to life in Britain. This evidence-based small scale study conducted in Peterborough identifies, through the voices of Muslim youth, that madrasas have the potential, with suggested improvements, to help Muslim youth inscribe their religious identities within a secular pluralistic British society. The findings have great ramifications for madrasa leaders and policy makers.

The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland, 1286–1707, ed. Jacqueline Rose

So central was counsel to late medieval and early modern political life in Britain that it might be thought too big a subject for one volume. What could be excluded from consideration? The editor, Jacqueline Rose, observes at the outset that counsel was ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘inescapable’. That the volume nevertheless coheres owes much to her comprehensive and lucid introduction: this synthesis should be the starting-point for anyone grappling with the subject. As the introduction acknowledges, counsel involved more than mediating the relationship between rulers and their subjects, for it was believed to be the route to all good decision-making (from personal matters such as choice of marital partner, to questions of universal import such as war or peace). Two chapters reflect the importance of counsel to the governance of self-defining communities. Eliza Hartrich’s well-researched piece considers the place of counsel in English cities and towns in the early fifteenth century. Intriguingly, it suggests that, in the 1420s, counselling practices and values at national and local levels were mutually reinforcing. Alexander Haskell’s discussion of the Virginia Company two hundred years later proposes that a conciliar structure legitimised its exercise of delegated royal authority in America. This governing arrangement may also have reflected the organisation of pre-existing chartered companies with outposts overseas; counselling practices in other trading and craft associations would thus repay study. The volume, however, concentrates on the ‘macropolitics of counsel’ in relation to the monarchy.

Documenting London’s bass culture and blues dances: Reggae in the films of Horace Ové and Franco Rosso

Abstract This article provides an analysis of two black British feature films – Horace Ové’s 1975 film, Pressure and Franco Rosso’s 1980 film, Babylon – and integrates the films into a wider discussion of life in Britain during the 1970s–80s. Drawing on the musical and cultural theories of Paul Gilroy and on the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s concept of ‘bass culture’, the author argues that reggae creates what Clare Corbould calls an ‘aural community’ that is simultaneously local and transnational. The reggae soundtracks layer Britain’s black history into the built space of London, insisting that the films’ audiences hear the ongoing reverberations of the British histories of slavery and colonialism.

PRIMITIVE CRITICISM AND THE NOVEL: G. H. LEWES AND HIPPOLYTE TAINE ON DICKENS

In a controversial article onthe life and fiction of Charles Dickens, George H. Lewes ponders the inexplicable preference of readers for the novelist's too-simplistic characters over the more complex characters of other writers. He finds an answer in the primitive reaction to fine art: “To a savage there is so little suggestion of a human face and form in a painted portrait that it is not even recognized as the representation of a man” (“Dickens” 150). The implication, it would seem, is that readers turn to Dickens because they are similarly incapable of appreciating more refined modes of art. Today the remark reads as gratuitous and insulting to readers, to Dickens, and to the other cultures Lewes stereotypes as savage. At the same time, the casual nature of the passage also suggests that it reflects commonly held beliefs about primitive life, beliefs we do not have but that Lewes and his readers took for granted. He was clearly safe in assuming such a body of common knowledge, for many other articles in theFortnightly Review(in which Lewes's article appeared in 1872) had similar references to primitivism. Reading through the journal issues of the time, the extent to which anthropological concepts had escaped the covers of books on primitive society and taken up residence in the pages of review essays on contemporary issues – from history, to life in the colonies, to life in Britain itself – is striking. In its print context, the comment about savages and art is less isolated and inexplicable than it is representative of a broad turn to the topic of primitivism in social commentary and analysis during the 1870s.

Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon by Paul David Blanc

Reviewed by: Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon by Paul David Blanc David Rosner Paul David Blanc. Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016. xiv + 309 pp. $40.00 (978-0-300-20466-7). In March 1846 a remarkable discovery was made that had a profound impact on economic life in Britain and ultimately around the world. Chemist Alexander Parke adapted a newly discovered chemical with the pungent odor of rotten eggs [End Page 387] to the task of making gooey natural rubber into a material that could be molded and shaped into any one of a thousand products—tires, balls, infant pacifiers, gloves, etc.—in the expanding industrial and consumer markets. The material was carbon disulphide (CS2). By the middle of the twentieth century it would become the basis for a host of pliable synthetics that would transform commercial life: cellophane, rubber goods, rayon, and other synthetic materials and fibers. In the late nineteenth century it was found that CS2, when combined with cellulose, formed a synthetic fiber that was stable, strong, resistant to insects, and safe to wear. Synthetics produced with CS2 and cellulose came to be known as "glos," "artificial silk," and later, "rayon." One major drawback in the use of CS2 was that it was highly poisonous. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eye disease, hallucinations, agitation, parkinsonianism, and a host of disorders were documented among workers in Europe and the United States as the uses of the synthetic fibers expanded. The fascinating history of how this material insinuated itself into the lives of millions is the central issue that Paul Blanc explores with truly awe-inspiring depth. Blanc traces the chemical, political, medical, and social history of this seemingly simple material and, through his biographical approach, details the history of the twentieth century. We learn of numerous case reports of workers who suffered from horrifying neurological diseases in the rubber and automobile industry as industries found ways to exploit Africa, India, and the rest of South Asia in their quest to find the raw material. While Fake Silk closely outlines the technical history of the modern synthetics industry and its ramification for workers and consumers, the book's heart lies in its deep understanding of the relationship between the politics of the twentieth century and the evolution of the chemical industry itself. Blanc never fails to remind the reader of how closely intertwined was the history of science and the evolution of the industrial state. Some issues he draws out are familiar to readers in environmental science's somewhat tarnished history: When workers in the viscose plants of England were identified in one of Sir Thomas Legge's final writings as victims of severe eye conditions, Legge was attacked by expert witnesses who served as consultants to a Rayon manufacturing concern. They objected that such reports of injuries would result in "crippling of a rising industry" (p. 55). Blanc details this "rising industry" in exquisite detail, identifying a host of interlocking international concerns that manufactured viscose, the basis for rayon and other CS2 products, despite the growing attention of a handful of researchers and political organizations that saw in the production process an important threat to the health of workers. In fact, during the 1930s, with an economic depression and the rise of German Fascism, both the left and the right saw the products of CS2 as ripe symbols of broader labor and social struggles. Blanc pays close attention to the cultural meanings of synthetics as they entered into the mainstream of commerce in the industrial world. Did "rayon" or other viscose materials represent progress or regress? Was rayon a symbol of modernity or repression? Was Aldous Huxley's use of viscose as a symbol of the cheapening quality of life in Brave New World the way in which the broader population would [End Page 388] understand synthetics or was Dupont's public relations campaign which touted its products as "Better Living through Chemistry" to dominate? This is a marvelous book that marks, I believe, a new stage of historical analysis. The research is impeccable. Sources from virtually every corner of the industrializing world...

Re-thinking the Veil, Jihad and Home in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014)

Abstract In her latest novel Willow Trees Don’t Weep(2014), the writer Fadia Faqir decided to go against the grain as a Muslim woman coming from the Middle East but lives in Britain and write about jihad, terrorism and Taliban. In this novel, the author negotiates meanings of secularism, fundamentalism, jihad, fathering, women and wars. The novel’s protagonist, Najwa is torn between her mother’s secularism and her father’s religious fundamentalism. In her homeland, Amman, Najwa is different from many other girls of Amman because she does not wear the headscarf that represents hijab, a religious garment, in many Muslim countries. However, when she travels to Afghanistan to trace her father, Najwa meets women wearing the burqaa, a head-to-toe veil. This might be an unexpected re-consideration of this garment as a symbol of freedom because she met veiled women who are self-determined and emancipated from within. Therefore, this article sets out to explore how the novel’s protagonist re-considers the veil, home and self-discovery.

Industrial Balladry, Mass Culture, and the Politics of Realism in Cold War Britain

Focusing on a series of pioneering radio ballads produced for the BBC between 1958 and 1961 by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, and Peggy Seeger, this article explores representations of industrial working-class culture in folksongs of the radical Left. Situating such work in relation to A. L. Lloyd, mass culture, the nascent New Left, gender, and the aesthetics of social realism (distinct from the project of Soviet socialist realism), I argue that early radio ballads were nostalgic panegyrics for the integrity of working-class identity in the face of unprecedented socio-economic change. At the very moment when distinctively masculine working-class traditions seemed to be at risk of disappearing under the rising tide of affluence, Conservative Party rhetoric, female emancipation, and the emergence of a classless commodity utopia, these programs generated a portrait of an unwavering British subculture damaged and defined by capitalist exploitation yet resistant to the unwelcome advance of globalized modernity. Ultimately, such work revealed far more about MacColl’s own political convictions than about the intricacies of working-class life in Britain.

We have made history, but what about our future?

We have made history, but what about our future?

Muslim Women’s Political Engagement in British and French Society

This article addresses the participation of women from Muslim communities in civic and political life in Britain and France against the backdrop of racism and discrimination. It establishes the key features of the societal frameworks which surround those women in the two countries since World War II and pays particular attention to dimensions informed by racism and anti-Muslim prejudice. It interrogates the interaction of the women with majority society, the obstacles and enablements they identify and the impact it may have on their participation in the public sphere, on their civic and political engagement.

Mr Cameron's New Language Initiative for Muslim Women: Lessons in Policy Implementation

AbstractAs the government announces a programme to teach Muslim women to speak English, this article examines how such a policy can be implemented successfully, arguing that lessons can be drawn from both academic research, especially that carried out with Muslim women themselves, and previous successful policy application. It focuses on two projects carried out in the recent past for the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and Jobcentre Plus, and outlines the key factors that led to their success. The LSC project involved one of the largest in‐depth surveys of Muslim women's attitudes towards work, and their views on life in Britain, that has ever been undertaken. The Jobcentre Plus project was a highly successful and innovative employment training initiative for ethnic minority women piloted in Sheffield, the very kind of ‘targeted’ approach that Mr Cameron has claimed his government's new language initiative will be.

In the name of the Other? Refugee theatre and the value of “illegal” life in Britain

Drawing on refugee theatre performances by companies such as ice&fire, this article explores the politics of Testimonial Refugee Theatre in Britain and how illegal life is performed in contemporary verbatim theatre productions. Within the realm of narratives of flight, political drama holds an important position as a genre, because of its ability to create intimate immediacy. In theatre halls and post-performance gatherings, audiences can feel ready to inquire about politics. The variety of theatre productions dealing with refugee issues is enormous and refugee theatre adds new dimensions to discussions concerning Britain as a post-racial society. Contemporary refugee theatre in general, and its two major subgenres Container Plays and Testimonial Refugee Plays in particular, function as dramatic buffer zones which signal post-racial dimensions while re-inscribing alienation into the cultural and social make-up of British society. The plays discussed include Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman, Sonja Linden’s I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda, Clare Bayley’s The Container and Sylvie Hoffmann and Aimé Kongolo’s White Goods. Influential international productions such as Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssées) directed by Ariane Mnouchkine and Christoph Schlingensief’s container performance spectacle Big Brother, Foreigners Out! (Ausländer Raus! 2000) serve as background screens against which the arguments unfold.