British Politics Research Articles

THE CONCEPT OF SPLENDID ISOLATION: A CONTEMPORARY APPROACH

The article deals with the concept of «splendid isolation», traditionally associated with British foreign policy in the late 19th century, refers to the period when Britain distanced itself from European alliances. This article examines the rationale and consequences of this policy through a contemporary lens, drawing on contemporary scholarship to reassess the motivations and outcomes of Britain's diplomatic posture in that era. Analyzing the concept of «splendid isolation», the study focuses on the political, economic and military factors that determined British strategy. The focus of the study is also the analysis of criticism of this strategy and its consequences for Great Britain in the context of changes in the international balance of power at the beginning of the 20th century. The question arises as to whether «splendid isolation» was really an effective strategy for protecting national interests and maintaining the status of a world power. The traditional view of British foreign policy in the late Victorian era emphasizes independence and avoidance of binding alliances. The article examines the changes in the international environment, especially the growing competition from France, Russia, Germany and the United States, and how they influenced the decisions of British politicians. The article also examines the transition from isolationist policies to strategic alliances at the beginning of the 20th century.

How attitudes towards independence reshaped Scottish elections: A longitudinal analysis (1999–2021)

AbstractBritish and Scottish politics are undergoing a period of tumultuous change, leading to what some scholars have labelled ‘electoral shocks’, which have altered the relative importance of the main issues explaining citizens' political behaviour. The conventional wisdom now posits that attitudes towards Scottish independence play an increasing role in structuring citizens' vote choice in Scotland. However, a longitudinal assessment of this claim is lacking. In this research, we seek to fill this gap by making use of data from 1999 to 2021, which covers every Scottish election since devolution, and providing the first‐ever systematic assessment of the strength of attitudes towards Scottish independence in explaining electoral behaviour over time. Our findings reveal a substantial increase in the importance of attitudes towards independence, which we can quantify throughout the 1999–2021 period. We conclude by discussing the implications of this for British and Scottish politics.

British-Armenian Military Relations in Transcaucasia During the Early Stages of the Russian Civil War (1917–1918): A Critical Analysis

This article offers a critical examination of the British-Armenian military relations in Transcaucasia during the early stages of the Russian Civil War (1917-1918), highlighting the complex interplay between British foreign policy, imperial ambitions, and local nationalisms.The plight of the Armenians resonated deeply with the British public and politicians during the First World War. A crucial moment came when the Russian monarchy fell, triggering a complex scenario in Transcaucasia and necessitating a thorough reshuffle of Britain’s foreign and military strategies in the region. In this context, the present study analyses Britain’s political maneuvers and dealings with Armenians in response to the evolving situation in Transcaucasia after the February Revolution. This article shows that notwithstanding the humanitarian ethos that was prevalent in British political rhetoric after the February Revolution in Russia, the strategic undertakings of Britain on the Caucasus front were heavily influenced by its imperial politics and determination to maintain its role in shaping the future of the Middle East and larger Asia. Highlighting the contradictions in British policies toward the region, it argues that these policies were mainly characterized by a colonial mindset that regarded Armenians and other local forces merely as serviceable instruments for realizing a broader imperialist agenda.

‘Towards a modern democracy’? The constitutional politics of the 1990s British left

ABSTRACT This article argues that a ‘constitutional lens’ sheds light on British political contestation in the 1990s. It is commonly suggested that 1990s politicians merely consolidated the hegemony of ‘Thatcherism’. Yet, this struggles to encompass the decade’s political volatility, from the Conservatives’ descent into internecine warfare over the Maastricht Treaty to the fraught Irish peace process. Though varied, these developments shared a key theme: controversy over the constitution of the United Kingdom. To illustrate its case, this article applies the constitutional lens to the 1990s left. Existing accounts emphasise Labour’s concessions to Conservative opponents. By 2001, however, the first Blair government had enacted contentious constitutional changes: devolution, proportional voting systems, and a Human Rights Act. These policies reflected a dynamic, new, liberal-left politics of constitutional reform. From the 1980s, liberals, social democrats and Marxists forged a new constitutional agenda, responding to trends since the 1960s—growing ‘popular individualism’, agitation for ‘human rights’, European integration, and Scottish nationalism—and to the end of the Cold War. By the 1990s, campaigners had developed a bold programme for ‘modernising the constitution’, which influenced Labour’s programme. Through New Labour’s governments, this agenda profoundly reshaped the institutions of British politics in the twenty-first century.

“Gays in Your Living Room”: LGBTQ+ Television, Homophobia, and the Birth of Channel 4 in 1980s Britain

ABSTRACT This article examines the conflicting attitudes toward homosexuality and public-service broadcasting among British program-makers, pressure groups, newspapers, politicians, and viewers in the 1980s through the prism of Channel 4’s One in Five (1983), billed as “the first programme ever to begin to show what it means to be positively gay.” It pairs a close reading of the broadcast with wide-ranging research in the archives of broadcasters, LGBTQ+ organizations, Parliament, and the press to show why minority programming formed a major arena of contestation over the representation and rights of lesbian and gay people in late twentieth-century Britain. Straight opposition to One in Five captured the strength and characteristics of homophobia in the 1980s, while the program’s divisive effect on queer audiences illuminated divisions within the LGBTQ+ community at the cusp of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The program was dogged by difficulties in creating a cohesive queer identity capable of accommodating differences in gender and ethnicity, region and nation, lifestyle, class, sexual practices, and political orientation. The inception, production, and reception of One in Five simultaneously highlight the particularities of sexual politics in Thatcherite Britain and ongoing dilemmas about the processes and merits of achieving inclusion, diversity, and equality for marginalized groups.

Black British Politics, Bernie Grant, and the Question of Hong Kong Migration

Black British Politics, Bernie Grant, and the Question of Hong Kong Migration

The British NHS at 75: Past, Contemporary, and Future Challenges.

This article assesses how and why the National Health Service (NHS) has remained at the forefront of British politics and society for 75 years amid significant economic pressures, organizational strain, shifting ideological trends, ongoing reforms, and an unprecedented public health emergency. The postwar "years of consensus" evolved into alleged decline and ostensible neglect during the 1980s, while New Labour sought to rejuvenate this core public service after 1997, featuring investment and often controversial reforms that challenged the party's social democratic values. Amid the New Labour era, NHS powers filtered down to devolved administrations, while from 2008 retrenchment and austerity ensued, fueled by global recession. Austerity eventually subsided, yet from early 2020 the NHS swiftly faced the extreme conditions of the globalized Covid-19 pandemic. The service continues to face challenges regarding its longer-term viability, and this article analyzes this scenario, within the context of the NHS's 75-year historical legacy, its contemporary status, comparative international trends, and likely future evolution.

The Church of England and British Politics Since 1900. Edited by Tom Rodger, Philip Williamson, and Matthew Grimley

The Church of England and British Politics Since 1900. Edited by Tom Rodger, Philip Williamson, and Matthew Grimley

The asymmetric power model 20 years on

Abstract It is over 20 years since the publication of the Asymmetric Power Model (APM). In the ensuing period, Britain has faced multiple challenges: the increasing fragmentation of public services; austerity politics; devolution; and, most recently, coronavirus disease and Brexit. It is this backdrop which provides the context to this article. First, it addresses how the literature has subsequently evolved. It then examines what has changed over the last two decades while also emphasizing what remains the same. Here, we highlight issues regarding both increased inequality and instability, focusing particularly on tension emerging from a de-centralizing-recentralizing approach to governance. The article concludes by offering a revised APM as a means of understanding British politics moving forward.

Disability and Representation in British Politics

Disability and Representation in British Politics

Instability, crisis, and statecraft in Conservative Britain, 2010–24

Abstract This article examines how the Conservative Party dominated British politics from 2010 to 2024 despite this period being one of instability and crisis. It argues that a key source of this turmoil was the Conservative Party itself, which under a succession of Prime Ministers struggled to formulate an effective statecraft strategy. While these leadership failings have been well documented the underlying difficulties run deeper, reflecting tensions for the self-proclaimed natural party of government in adapting its statecraft to the rise of populist and anti-politics pressures. The article exposes these through the lens of statecraft theory, which is applied to the largely overlooked constitutional dimension of Conservative statecraft. This reveals a persistent willingness to prioritize partisan statecraft strategy over adherence to constitutional norms, which portends a slide into populism now the party has returned to opposition.

Enduring inequalities in British politics: Muslim women in the Labour Party

Abstract This article combines an understanding of British politics grounded in the Asymmetric Power Model with intersectionality to comprehend Muslim women’s experiences in the Labour Party. This paper shows that an intersectional framework and an analysis of political parties’ relationships with their members are essential to understanding the enduring inequalities of the British political system. Muslim women are under-represented in our political system; they face multiple forms of discrimination (racism and sexism). Some Muslim men have and use their relative power over Muslim women through their use of biraderi-politicking, and Muslim women do not trust the Labour Party to support them.

The British Political Tradition and Constitutional Policy: The Offer of Deliberative Mini Publics

Abstract The Review of the UK Constitution was an eighteen-month project assessing the functioning of the UK constitution resulting in a set of practical, innovative, and robust recommendations. This article draws out one theme from this research, the offer of Deliberative Mini Publics (DMPs) in the process of constitutional change in the UK. Using Marsh, Richards, and Smith’s ‘Asymmetric Power Model’ as a mechanism for understanding the centralised and top–down nature of British democracy, we argue that the integration of DMPs can offer an opportunity to mitigate some of the core problems with the functioning of the UK constitution and produce better constitutional policy.

Family, politics and media

Abstract In this paper, we utilise the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a wider electorate via media reporting of those hustings. With the use of social actor analysis (van Leeuwen 2008), approached through collocation, we find that a distinctive feature of media reporting was a focus on Gladstone’s family. This surprising intersection of family and electioneering reveals a powerful hierarchy of social relationships in terms of gender and seniority, which became an effective propaganda strategy as Gladstone, enabled by Liberal-supporting newspapers, utilised his family as a political tool.

The challenge of devolved English governance and the rise of political spatial inequality

Abstract The UK is characterised by spatial inequality between and within regions, alongside an over-centralised asymmetric model of governance. In England especially, these features are stark, and throughout the last decade, politicians have responded by forging a distinctive programme of English devolution focused on city-regions. In this article, we analyse the core drivers of the English devolution agenda to understand its impact on the future trajectory of British politics. We identify the predominance of a narrow economic vision of devolution that systematically negates other agendas. The result is a failure to address the trade-offs inherent in the devolution process, alongside an inadequate engagement with the growing demand for democratic revitalisation. In the long-term, we argue that the empowerment of the largest cities in England and the relative neglect of non-urban areas will exacerbate power asymmetries within the UK political system in both centre-periphery and centre-local relations, a phenomenon we term ‘political spatial inequality’. There is a risk of resurgent ‘territorially based populism’ stemming from this uneven political geography which has the potential to exacerbate political instability and significantly reshape UK politics in the wake of Brexit. English devolution is a prescient example of how policy ‘solutions’ can in turn create new problems that pose major challenges for policymakers.

An unstable Union? The Conservative Party, the British Political Tradition, and devolution in Scotland and Wales 2010–23

Abstract While devolution in Scotland and Wales is often established as the settled will, it has been built on unsettled ground, lacking a robust system of intergovernmental relations, and sitting increasingly at odds with the central principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Examining successive UK Conservative-led governments, we evaluate devolution in Scotland and Wales through the lens of the Asymmetric Power Model and the British Political Tradition, documenting changes in the position of successive Conservative governments, from the more plurinationally sensitive respect agenda of David Cameron to the more assertive and intrusive Unionism advanced under those in post after 2016, notably Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

Instability and inequality in the British state

Abstract The UK state has been through many periods of perceived crisis, but the instability of the last decade has shaken some of the foundational institutions of British politics. Our main argument is that the rise of political instability relates to the failure of British politics to respond to structural inequality in society and politics. This includes growing economic and geographic disparities, as well as destabilizing divisions over long-standing social injustices. The infusion of these trends into the political process is the subject of the ‘asymmetric power model (APM)’, which acts as the theoretical underpinning of this paper and the special issue it introduces. In this editorial to the Parliamentary Affairs Special Issue on ‘Instability and inequality in the British state’, we elaborate these arguments and provide a brief overview of the eight papers in the issue, which cover the APM, the constitution, the UK Union, the Conservative Party, public policymaking, gender inequalities, intersectional inequalities, and geographical inequalities. Together, the papers identify the causes and features of the UK’s troubling inequality-instability dialectic and offer various practical and theoretical ways forward.

Do South Asian Politicians Use More Metaphors Than Western Politicians? A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Metaphor In Bangladesh, British, And American Political Discourse

Several studies have investigated the relationship between metaphor and politics; however, no research has specifically focused on the use of metaphors by Bangladeshi politicians. This study aims to address this gap by analyzing the use of conceptual metaphors by Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina Wazed, drawing from the three major source domains of CONFLICT, JOURNEY, and RELIGION. The findings are then compared to those from a study by Charteris-Black (2004), which examined variations in metaphor choice in the inaugural speeches of American Presidents and the party political manifestos of two British political parties from 1974-1997. Since there are no available corpora in the Bangladesh context, I compiled a corpus with 91 speeches from PM Hasina Wazed, containing a total of 101,490 words. Data was analyzed using AntConc software. As Bangladesh is a developing country where religion holds a significant influence, this paper sheds light on how economic development programs have impacted the use of metaphors, while surprisingly religion has not. Additionally, there are some shreds of evidence of family and personal elements appearing in the data.

Social and Cultural Factors in Expressing Politeness in English and Romanian

Even if the Romanian language, on the one hand, and the English language, on the other hand, have different historical backgrounds, with no genetic relatedness, there are quite a number of similarities in expressing politeness in both languages. Our present survey is focused on the investigation of politeness from the socio-cultural point of view, emphasizing the similarities and differences that exist between the two languages. We have discussed the main linguistic theoretical aspects regarding this phenomenon, from different points of view: the conversational view, the face-saving view and politeness viewed as a conversational contract. Afterwards, we have approached in detail the problem of linguistic politeness, highlighting the social and cultural factors that have the strongest impact on choosing a certain way of addressing. We have come to the conclusion that the similarities and differences that exist among the Romanian and English languages as regards politeness expression are triggered by various value systems and by different cultural and social systems.

Субстантивные предложения как средство выражения британскими политиками суждений о своей идентичности (на материале стенограмм заседаний парламента Великобритании за 2020 г.)

The paper examines the semantic-structural characteristics of substantive sentences used by British politicians when verbalizing their identity judgements in parliamentary discourse. Attention is focused on the substantive sentences with the structure “S (Pr) + P (Vfcop + N)” implementing the proposition P(x) with the semantics “attribution of a feature to the subject of judgment”. The aim of the study is to determine what view of the speaker as an identity holder is formed by means of these sentences, depending on their semantic-structural properties. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it identifies and describes types of substantive sentences that differ in their semantic-structural characteristics and reveals their correlation with the verbalization of certain information about the speaker’s identity. As a result of the study, it is found that in English substantive sentences of different types a different format of the speaker’s perception is created: the speaker can act as a representative of a certain category (group) of people, as a single whole with a community of people sharing the same characteristics, as an owner of rather vague properties and characteristics inherent in all members of the group to which the speaker himself belongs.