Politics In Britain Research Articles

Politeness Variation: Politeness in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong

British culture is often characterized by off-record or negative politeness (e.g., Blum-Kulka, 1987; Ogiermann, 2009) and norms giving prominence to social distance (van Dorst et al., 2024). It is worth exploring whether other English varieties exhibit similar characteristics within the field of variational pragmatics. This paper presents a corpus-based study that investigates politeness variation in Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong. This study seeks empirical evidence regarding variations among British English, Australian English, and Hong Kong English in terms of three different politeness types: tentativeness, deference, and solidarity, and three different levels of formality: informal, neutral, and formal. Twenty-one frequently occurred formulaic expressions regularly associated with politeness are chosen and retrieved from the GB, AU, and HK components of the GloBwE Corpus. A close analysis of the results revealed significant differences across politeness types and levels of formality among the three English varieties. Australian English exhibits the highest relative frequency of deference politeness, solidarity politeness, and both informal and formal politeness formulae, followed by British English, with Hong Kong English showing the least. In contrast, Hong Kong English has the highest relative frequency of tentativeness politeness and neutral formality politeness formulae. This study finds that several factors may influence the use of three politeness types and three levels of formalities, including urbanization level, population density, settings, culture, and pragmatic transfer. Overall, this study examines politeness variation in British, Australian, and Hong Kong English using corpus-based methods, contributing to both variational pragmatics and corpus pragmatics.

Confronting complex alliances: Situating Britain’s gender critical politics within the wider transnational anti-gender movement

Britain has recently gained notoriety as a global hotspot for anti-trans politics and ‘gender critical’ feminism. But what is the relationship between British ‘gender critical’ politics and the transnational ‘anti-gender’ movement? Does Britain’s gender critical feminism directly align with the global trends of anti-gender mobilisations, including the latter’s authoritarian and neofascist tendencies? This commentary argues for a context-specific analysis of the British gender-critical movement which is attentive to its divergent political orientations. While some strands of gender-critical politics are openly allied with far-right politics and are explicitly anti-feminist, others include prominent figures from left-wing positions, including left feminists and lesbians. Challenging gender-critical politics in Britain requires a reckoning with its cross-political nature and an analysis of the factors that unite these different strands across left and right.

Gendering the floating voter: A mixed methods study of gender and undecided voters in Britain

Women are more undecided than men about their vote choice, with around 20%–30% of female respondents giving a ‘don’t know’ response to vote intention survey questions in Britain. In this article, we employ a mixed methods research design to explore why women are more likely to be undecided about their vote choice than men. Using survey data, we find that the gender gap in ‘don’t know’ responses is associated with gender gaps in political engagement and perceptions of policy representation. In focus groups, we find differences between men and women in how they want to be represented, and gender differences in conflict-avoidance/conflict-seeking, both of which we expect to contribute to gender differences in making a vote choice in-between elections. Our findings contribute to our understanding of how men and women engage with politics in Britain, as well as having implications for interpreting gender differences in vote intention in surveys.

The Third Earl Grey, Liberalism, and the British Empire

This article suggests that Henry, third Earl Grey, had a vision of a liberal British world, which he hoped to implement through a political career. It was based on strong executive governance, representative politics, and the abolition of protection and slavery. It relied on the free market and good race relations to bring progress. He rejected the idea that legislation could impose improvement on colonial peoples. His program was quickly derailed, because of turbulent representative politics in Britain and the colonies after 1848. Later political developments made any integrated liberal vision of empire even more impractical. Studying Grey's arguments, and their fate, can help the task of defining British imperial liberalism. It is best understood as an attempt to check (Tory) vested interests, rather than as an ideology of interventionist improvement. Its priorities and tensions make most sense in relation to the concepts, assumptions, and turning points that dominated British politics.

The Group Appeal Strategy: Beyond the Policy Perspective on Party Electoral Success

Political parties use policy appeals to change their policy images and increase electoral support. Building on the idea that parties’ group images also matter to voters, this article shows that group appeals can benefit parties as well. Combining manifesto data on policy and group appeals covering 50 years, we revisit the shift from class to catch-all politics in Britain and present three findings. First, a vote share analysis shows that the Labour Party benefited from using not just policy but also group appeals to downplay its class image. Second, consistent with a catch-all strategy, survey evidence shows that this boost in Labour support was most prominent outside the traditional base. Third, while group appeals had independent effects, we show how group and policy appeals also interact and reinforce each other. This suggests that non-policy strategies matter to parties’ electoral success on their own but also in combination with policy strategies.

The rise of local labour legislation campaigns in post-war Hong Kong, 1969–1981

ABSTRACT This article tells the story of the rise of local labour legislation agenda in post-war Hong Kong in the period between 1969 and 1981. For over a hundred years, the legislation on labour issues has been mainly led by the Colonial Office, which was driven by the changing politics in Britain. Given the lack of channels for workers to participate in the government, the weak and divided union movement, and the unions’ prioritization of external political agenda over local workers’ welfare, workers’ voices had no influence at all on labour legislation. Looking into three legislative campaigns between 1969 and 1981, this article reveals how non-governmental organizations, rather than labour unions, mobilized workers to develop the local labour agenda serving workers in Hong Kong. This is a missing chapter in the study of Hong Kong’s labour legislation history and contributes to the understanding of the rise of the autonomous labour movement in post-war Hong Kong.

Constructions of race in advertising archives: The “silent” Chinese minority

What do historical representational imageries of the Chinese in television commercials tell us about Britain’s perceptions of this ‘silent’ community? The power of advertising to distort reality and misrepresent ‘the Other’ is well documented. This report addresses colonial constructions of race in advertising using historical archival evidence of the Chinese as a hidden ethnic minority community in Britain. The arguments, drawn from my doctoral thesis, emphasises the importance of archival analysis in historical research on race. In particular, cultural commodification of Chinese culture is evidenced by their depiction during 1960s television commercials for Guinness Export. These interrogations provide clues to how Chinese people and culture have been constructed onscreen, and the political and hegemonic influence of racial politics in Britain. The report also considers the methodological implications of archival holdings in contributing to our understanding how and why race on screen advertising is produced, consumed, and reproduced.

Asian Muslim women's struggle to gain value: The labour behind performative visibility as everyday politics in Britain

Historical and contemporary discourses around Muslim women represent them through gendered cultural tropes of victims of their own patriarchal community, racial tropes of victims of islamophobia, the sexualised and fetishized ‘other’ or complicit in ‘terrorist’ activity. However, Muslim women's investment in race relations is evident in their performative visibility in everyday spaces (e.g., work, education, shops, streets etc.), where they know that participatory parity is an uninhabitable category for them as minority women. Shifting focus from activism to struggle, this research demonstrates that Muslim women's struggle against stereotypical classifications is a form of politics, a struggle to be recognised as ‘doing politics’ in different ways, in different arenas of social life, disrupting relations between Muslims and majority British society. The paper also shows participants use of different strategies, reframing, challenging and ambivalence, as ways of doing politics explaining how power-relations are active in different spaces in these women's everyday lives.

The Future of British Political History: Concluding Remarks

AbstractThese concluding remarks reflect, in the light of the preceding articles, on two themes that recur throughout the collection. First, how can historians maintain an effective presence in public debate about politics in Britain? Second, how should political historians position themselves within the discipline, at a time when—it is suggested—political history is losing ground among British academic historians? It is argued here that, in each case, they should reflect on what they can most distinctively contribute, either as historians or as political historians; and that they should frame their interventions accordingly.

Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond

AbstractThe nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post‐1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Liberal revival’ from the late 1950s to the 2010–15 coalition might be reintegrated with contemporary historiography, including debates about deindustrialisation, class dealignment and the rise of ‘popular individualism’. It argues that careful attention to the nature and limits of Liberals’ political agency can help us understand the changing meaning and significance of third‐party politics in Britain.

Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain by Francis Young (review)

Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain by Francis Young (review)

The battle on the river Somme and the historical politics in Britain

The article focuses on the commemorative experience of Britain in the context of a systematic study of the policy of memory at the present stage of the country's development. The main purpose of the study is to analyse the forms and ways of representing the Battle of the Somme in modern Britain as a historical reality, highlighting the main features of the British experience of preserving the memory of this event and transmitting it for a mass audience. The author proposes an attempt to trace the development of ideas in scientific and popular science materials concerning the event as a collective trauma, the memory of which has been reflected in British historiography since its formation in 1916. The collective memory of the events of the First World War in Britain is often ambiguous and debatable, especially the Battle of the Somme, which changed people's perception of armed conflicts. As part of the study of the British politics of memory, it was revealed that the "historical narrative" of the battle is to glorify the exploits of the expeditionary forces on the Western Front and at the same time criticise the commanders of the armed forces responsible for massive combat losses.

Review: Cabotajes Novohispanos: Espacios y contactos marítimos en torno a la Nueva España, by Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos

Review: <i>Cabotajes Novohispanos: Espacios y contactos marítimos en torno a la Nueva España</i>, by Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos

'The city is dying ... The suburbs are growing ... The country shrinks': spatial Maoism and Suburban Press

Historians have typically presented the early 1970s underground paper Suburban Press, a major stylistic influence on the emergence of punk, as a British application of Situationist ideas and aesthetics. However, in this narrative, the role of Mao Zedong and Maoism in the underground press, and punk, gets reduced to their mimetic capacity to shock. This paper will reconsider Suburban Press within the context of Croydon's underground scene, to rescue an alternative narrative in which Mao and Maoism occupy a sincere and not only satirical position. It argues that the 'suburban' in the title of Suburban Press had three distinct meanings: the middle-class left-wing politics of the young radicals' parents; working-class areas like New Addington, analogous to the French banlieue ; and the complex process of (sub)urbanisation typified by Croydon's changing town centre. This paper thereby hints at a new history of the 'spatial turn' in which the influence of Maoism upon its key theorists – e. g., Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Doreen Massey – is recognised. It concludes by suggesting some implications for recent references to spatiality in leftwing politics in Britain, outlining a 'spatial Maoism' to add to the 'two lines of global Maoism' recently described by Colleen Lye.

Crossing the curtain: British activists and the echoes of soviet dissent in contemporary Russian human rights activism

The efforts of the Soviet authorities to suppress political opposition are widely known, utilising psychiatry to ‘treat’ political dissidents and the widespread, state-endorsed persecution of religious believers. These human rights violations often became flashpoints in the Cold War, shaping international relations and offering a moral weapon through which the Soviet Union could be attacked. Given the tightly controlled nature of information in the Soviet bloc, how did academics, journalists, and politicians in Britain know about this persecution? How could information obtained on the position of political dissidents be trusted in the West, and how did it end up influencing those in positions of power? Given recent events in Russia, understanding the historic response to human rights violations in the Cold War offers the space to reflect on contemporary concerns. This article argues that parallels can be drawn between human rights concerns in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and that understanding historic case studies can offer insight into the efforts of contemporary activists. Alongside this, it argues that the efforts of activists in Britain need to be considered in order to understand the way in which human rights issues in Russia are understood, placing these concerns into an international context.

Spartacus magazine and the commercial-political nexus of Gay Liberation

ABSTRACT Spartacus magazine (1969–1972) was one of Britain’s first openly gay periodicals. This essay explores the early career of its publisher, John D. Stamford, to argue for the constitutive role of gay entrepreneurs and transnational erotic commercial networks in articulating queer politics in Britain following the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. An examination of the reception of Stamford’s commercial and political work suggests that gay male consumption preceded political mobilisation rather than followed in its tracks. More so, that consumerism provided a shared vocabulary and an important platform on which a diverse readership coalesced around a set of contradictory political dictums on what constituted ‘proper’ sexual and gender expression.

Racial warfare and the biopolitics of policing

ABSTRACT In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report (1999) recognised London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’, senior police officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. This article examines police as a state institution where the politics of racism not only persist but do so coterminous with those of war. In doing so, I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, that deploys racism as a formal strategy of war in vigorous defence of Euro-modernity. I show how the legacy of the Macpherson Report speaks to post-racial logic, which interacts with liberal myths about policing as non-martial to obscure the police’s racialised and militarised makeup. Challenging this hegemonic framing, I analyse how anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms share common ground, by producing racially coded populations as enemies of revered Euro-modern hallmarks like law and order and national security. I contend that this deeply embedded othering of race as anti-modern rationalises the police’s martial credentials, thus making militarised policing a racialised endeavour. As such, I illustrate how police regulates race through biopolitical strategies of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability, to reveal racial police warfare as foundational to everyday socio-political life in Britain.

There and Back Again

This essay explores the defining role that council housing has played in populist politics in Britain from the post-war era to the present. Central to this was Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme – an archetypal populist policy that became totemic of her broader reconfiguration of British society. Building on the demonisation of council housing that paved the way for Right to Buy, today, it stands as the implicit foil for the present right-wing government’s populist advocation of ‘beauty’ (i.e. traditional styles) as a way of removing objections to future development. Meanwhile, the populist left argues for a return to the mass council house building of the post-war era, despite the recent success of small-scale, tactical council housing projects, such as those by Peter Barber Architects. The essay argues that the polarised and asymmetrical nature of this debate, conflating questions of aesthetics, typology and planning and tenure type, is typical of populist politics, ensuring a middle ground is by definition impossible. The essay concludes with the contention that if populist politics tends towards a monocultural architecture and urbanism, then a built environment that allows room for different forms, ideas and agendas may itself help foster a politics of pluralism.

Rethinking Populism Geopolitically: Authoritarian Populism and Migration Politics in Britain and Turkey

This research aims to analyse the authoritarian populism-migration nexus and to evaluate why and how authoritarian populist rhetoric vary in different geopolitical contexts. Recently, there has been a significant increase in the number of studies on populism and its impact on international politics and foreign policy. However, there is a dearth of research on the specific impact of authoritarian populist discourse on migration in different geopolitical specificities. This article will engage with two key research objectives to fill this gap. First, it examines the interaction between authoritarian populist rhetoric on managing migration in Britain and Turkey. Second, it interrogates whether the authoritarian populist impact on migration in these countries has overlapping features. This article contends that, as far as the authoritarian populism-migration nexus is concerned, populism is developed geopolitically.

Music to Some Consequence: Reaction, Reform, Race

AbstractA naval chaplain in the 1790s, a radical arrested after Peterloo, and a smash hit of blackface minstrelsy: these three disparate historical actors all provide exemplary cases of music in action, playing upon the political passions of the British people. Thinking across the three examples, this article reflects upon the aims of the forum Music and Politics in Britain, c.1780–1850, as well as advancing its own autonomous argument. Alexander Duncan was drummed out of the navy for publishing a pamphlet advocating the use of martial music in action; inspired by the French, Duncan was effectively arguing for a democratization of Britain's servicemen by playing upon their passions. The potential for subversion inherent in this approach was borne out by the career of Samuel Bamford, a Lancashire weaver; music was central to Bamford's activism, and I chart the functional ends to which he deployed music around 1819. In a third instance, with the 1840s hit “Buffalo Gals,” music led to public disorder. The song, due in large part to its musical qualities, enabled forms of licentious behavior among white males that mobilized latent forms of gendered as well as racial prejudice, so that its performance came to excuse forms of sexual harassment.