Young Britons Research Articles

Assessing the parental SES gradient in young Britons' partnership expectations, attitudes and its potential mediators.

A well-documented trend in family demography is that young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to enter their first partnership earlier and forego marriage more often than their advantaged counterparts. Yet, limited research has explored whether there is also an association between parental background and expectations for partnership formation, which are considered important precursors of behaviours. Further, few studies have explored the potential mechanisms mediating these differences. This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to analyse the relationships between parental socioeconomic status and young Britons' expectations for marriage, cohabitation, and attitudes towards ideal age at marriage. Using the KHB decomposition as a mediation method, we verify whether these relationships are explained by two mechanisms measured during the young adults' adolescence: family structure socialisation and academic socialisation. We find that marriage expectations are socially stratified in the UK. Those from the least advantaged backgrounds have significantly lower expectations for marriage than the most advantaged, but this difference does not hold for cohabitation. Those from the least advantaged backgrounds are also more uncertain about their ideal age at marriage. Academic socialisation mediates these relationships to a limited extent. Family structure socialisation mediates a greater percentage, especially living with a single parent, rather than married parents, during adolescence.

FIGHTING FOR ISIS – THE CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN

Abstract: The purpose of this research paper is to examine the online recruitment processes and socio-economic factors that allow for the radicalisation of people in Great Britain. The paper will address the following questions: 1) what are ISIS recruitment methods? 2) what makes the recruitment successful? 3) is religious motivation the main factor why people decide to fight for the Islamic State? According to the US National Counterterrorism Centre, in the recent years Islamic State (ISIS) recruited an estimate of 3,400 Westerners ready to fight its cause around the globe. Islamic State has a far more successful rate in luring members from the West than Al-Qaeda. In a relatively short time ISIS went from being an unknown terror cell to threatening worldwide security. Great Britain experienced a number of terrorist attacks in the recent years and the responsibility for them had been claimed by ISIS. However, with the arrival of easy access to the internet the radicalisation of young Britons has been on the rise in the recent years. The studies suggest that there are different motivations for joining Islamic State. Foreign fighters are made to believe that the terrorist group offers values that western democracies seem to lack, namely a common purpose, good morals and sense of belonging. These values are attractive for Muslims and for the new converts alike. Additionally, ISIS recruiters run an online propaganda machine. The process of radicalisation moved from the mosques into more effective online chat-rooms and social media forums.

Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930 by Shilpa Bhat Daithota

Reviewed by: Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930 by Shilpa Bhat Daithota Sharon Smulders (bio) Shilpa Bhat Daithota. Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930. Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxxi, 103. US$90.00. Shilpa Bhat Daithota’s Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930 is the most recent installment in Lexington Books’ series Children and Youth in Popular Culture. It examines the impact that Eurocentric discourses had on colonial children’s literature during the century preceding the Purna Swaraj Declaration (1930), which heralded the advent of political independence in India. Interested in the allegorical nature of animal stories, Daithota understands nineteenth-century children’s literature as legitimizing Western economic and cultural hegemony, both by mythologizing British imperial adventure and by dehumanizing indigenous Indians. Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives explores how animal imagery rehearsed “tropes of the ‘sub-human native’” (xx), indulged in racist domination as a pleasure, and encouraged young Britons to envision the colonial subjugation of India “as a vocation” (xxi). One strength of the monograph rests in the variety of materials Daithota considers “to understand the psychosis of whiteness that ran as an undercur-rent in the literature of the period” (xxx). Surveying exhibition pamphlets, alphabet books, nonsense poems, didactic tales, and adventure novels, she [End Page 174] examines the work of an eclectic range of imperial propagandists, including Mary Frances (Mrs. Ernest) Ames, Edward Lear, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, G. A. Henty, Alma Buley, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, Barbara Hofland, and Sara Jeanette Duncan. One rather surprising omission, however, is Helen Bannerman, whose first book, Little Black Sambo (1899), likely owes something to Goodrich’s “The Umbrella and the Tiger” in Peter Parley’s Short Stories for Long Nights (1837). In addition, while Daithota notes that Goodrich is American and Duncan Canadian, she does not similarly position Ames as Canadian or Buley as Australian. This oversight is a missed opportunity since it obscures the extent to which white colonists globally imagined India in children’s literature. Her discussion of several works would be enriched, moreover, by contextualizing their authors’ familiarity (or lack thereof) with South Asia. For example, The Jungle Book (1894), though written in Vermont, was informed by Kipling’s first-hand knowledge of India, where he spent the first five years of his life and where he later returned to work as a journalist. Given this experience, Kipling’s attitude toward India unsurprisingly possesses a complexity that differs from that of Burnett who, although she “neither visited India nor came from a family with Indian connections” (Buettner 27), chose to begin The Secret Garden (1888) and A Little Princess (1909) in the east. Similarly, some consideration of Lear’s own experience as a traveler would help to provide a more nuanced analysis of “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World” which, appearing in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1872), was published a few years before the painter embarked on the thirteen-month tour of the subcontinent documented in his Indian journal. As Ann Colley notes, Lear benefited significantly from acts of imperial power and control in his artistic career, but in his work for children, he also satirized the trophy-taking impetus “to show off colonial authority” (90) and “tame the exotic other by converting it into a domestic commodity” (91). Taking a chapter-by-chapter approach to various genres of colonial children’s literature, Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives implicitly traces young readers’ exposure to imperial ideologies from infancy to adolescence. Since individual chapters often treat texts in reverse chronological order, however, the organization of the whole tends to obfuscate the historical development of Eurocentric discourse from the 1830s to the 1930s. The discussion of imperial primers is typical insofar as Ames’ ABC for Baby Patriots (1899) precedes Colonial Alphabet for the Nursery (1880). Yet although Daithota usefully demonstrates how such works align imperial pedagogies with literacy education, occasional errors detract from the argument. For example, she states that the illustration for “A” (“Army”) in ABC for Baby Patriots shows a [End Page 175] row of “British citizens” arrayed...

There’s Just No Place for a Street Fighting Man!: Understanding the Influences of Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation in Britain’s Counterculture Between 1964-1971

During the 1960s, young Britons began to challenge the restrictive social norms, roles and responsibilities that governed their culture and asserted their voices to promote individual expression and freedom. At the core of this youth rebellion were the Rolling Stones. Within their music, performance, appearance and fashion, the Stones epitomized the anti-establishment attitudes harboured by Britain’s young people and made the cultural shifts that were taking place in the country tangible. In this research paper, I will investigate how Blackness, sexual orientation and gender identification challenged and reshaped the Rolling Stones’s message of rebellion, nonconformity and decadence. By reviewing a diverse range of archival footage, including the Stones’s performances on Ready Steady Go!, Jean-Luc Godard’s short film One-Plus-One and The Stones in the Park, as well as contemporary literary sources, music periodicals, Parliamentary legislation and British feminist, queer and Black Panther activism, I will evaluate the complicated, and often obscurantist, ways in which Britain’s youth rebellion fortified the subordination of traditionally marginalized communities while simultaneously making racial, queer and gender-based injustice visible to the British public. In sum, by placing the Stones’ racial, gendered and queer imagination within a complex political culture, I believe that my research will provide a unique perspective to the complexities and nuances of the social upheaval that occurred in Britain during the 1960s.

Social media and youth political engagement: Preaching to the converted or providing a new voice for youth?

Amidst concern about declining youth political engagement, it is often suggested that social media can provide a solution to this challenge. In this article, however, we argue that these online tools have not thus far mobilised a new audience to become engaged in either institution-oriented activities or political expression. Instead, we found that some young people are far more engaged in using social media for political purposes than others, and that a substantial proportion of young adults never use social media for this purpose. Using latent class analysis (LCA) of a unique web survey of young Britons aged 22–29, we show that the principal driver of online political engagement is political interest (even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics). On this basis, we conclude that social media may be providing a new outlet for some young adults; it is not re-engaging the young adults who have already lost interest in politics.

Schools and the twenty-first century labour market: perspectives on structural change

ABSTRACTThe focus of this article is the youth labour market and how changes within it have (negatively) affected the economic prospects of young Britons. It suggests ways in which schools and colleges can respond to such change in order to optimise the life chances of their students. The paper reviews the perspectives of two important groups of people well-placed to offer informed views to educationalists: policy commentators close to the political and academic debates surrounding youth employment; and, HR professionals with first-hand experience of recruitment. Synthesising perspectives, the paper highlights three key changes demanding attention: the growing complexity of the labour market; increased competition for entry level employment; and, the changing requirements of employers who increasingly seek new employees well placed to be personally effective in applying knowledge and skills in changing situations. The paper concludes by offering a framework for structuring school provision to optimise the school to work transitions of young people.

Local house prices, parental background and young adults’ homeownership in England and Wales

Financial constraints are thought to be making parental support an increasingly influential factor in the homeownership transitions of young Britons. This could inhibit social mobility, exacerbate the intergenerational transmission of wealth and deepen housing inequality. Although research shows that parental socio-economic advantage is associated with filial homeownership, less is known about whether these relationships are particularly pronounced in expensive housing markets where access to homeownership is often more constrained. This study tests this hypothesis by enriching the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study of England and Wales with data on local transactional house prices. Multilevel models indicate that disparities in the odds of homeownership between young adults with more and less socio-economically advantaged parents tend to deepen with increasing house prices. This pattern is most noticeable for women. However, parents and prices only intersect to greatly stratify the probability of homeownership when young adults’ circumstances are otherwise conducive to owning.

Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms

Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura).

‘SANDERS OF THE RIVER, STILL THE BEST JOB FOR A BRITISH BOY’; RECRUITMENT TO THE COLONIAL ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE AT THE END OF EMPIRE

ABSTRACTIn February 1951, the Sunday Express printed a piece extolling the virtues of a Colonial Service career, under the headline: ‘Sanders of the River, Still the Best Job for a British Boy’. This article explores the ideological and practical reasons why Sanders of the River, a character apparently so at odds with the post-Second World War Colonial Service message, continued to hold enough cultural resonance that it was considered appropriate to utilize him as a recruitment tool in 1951. Edgar Wallace's literary creation occupied a defining place in metropolitan understandings of the Colonial Service's work. Yet, by 1951, the ideological aims of the colonial project were changing. Sanders's paternalism had been dismissed in favour of a rhetoric that emphasized partnership and progress. The post-1945 district officer was expected to be a modern administrator, ready to work alongside educated Africans to prepare Britain's colonies for self-government. Exploring both Colonial Office recruitment strategies and recruits’ career motivations, this article situates the often ignored issue of Colonial Service recruitment at the end of empire within a wider cultural context to illuminate why, even as many turned away from careers in empire after 1945, a significant number of young Britons continued to apply.

Front Matter

Editorial Alun Howkins and Marybeth Hamilton Much of this issue of History Workshop Journal looks back to the middle years of the twentieth century. Our feature ‘Sexual Politics in mid twentieth-century Britain’ explores the sexual and social upheavals during and after the Second World War. Though the topics covered are diverse – from provincial adultery to 1950s queer London, from the emotional dynamics of a socialist marriage to the sexual dynamics of the films Kes and Billy Elliot – what unites these pieces is their concern to delineate the complex and sometimes fraught relations between politics and emotion, between mutuality and individualism, and between public engagement and private selves. That same concern prompts our second feature in this issue, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of a momentous year. In a sense, this journal itself, like so much of what emerged from the radical culture of the 1960s and 1970s, was a product of the events of 1956. From the ‘secret speech’ given by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Anglo-French and Israeli invasion of Egypt and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the British left, in common with comrades throughout the world, found some of its most fundamental assumptions shaken to the bone. For at least one member of the founding Editorial Collective of History Workshop Journal, Raphael Samuel, the Soviet invasion of Hungary had a profound and lasting impact, both on his politics and his writing of history, as it did for a generation of broadly socialist or communist historians. For others of us, children or young people in 1956, the impact of that year's events was less direct but still fundamental. For anyone who came on to the left in the 1960s, be it in London or Lahore, the legacy of that year was iconic, profound and continuously divisive. To others 1956 was the year of Suez. For those living in the Middle East war and occupation were traumatic day-to-day reality. For the former imperial powers, Britain and France, the ‘nationalization’ of the Suez Canal by Nasser was a blow to their control of crucial sea routes and the tip of an anti-imperialist iceberg which could not be ignored. To many young men and women, particularly in Britain, the invasion was a violent demonstration that despite all the gains of 1945–50 in terms of social justice, the British Lion, albeit a moth-eaten and battered beast, was still capable of behaving as if the year were 1880. When we came to look at the possibility of marking 1956 in some way we were deeply conscious of these separate legacies. We were also aware that [End Page i] many others would look again at those histories – and that has certainly been the case. In the last months the broadcast media and the broadsheet press in Britain have returned time and again to 1956, and especially to Suez. In much of this writing the Anglo-French and Israeli interventions have been cast, through the lens of hindsight, as forerunners of strictly contemporary events like the Iraq War and the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. While this has merit, it can obscure the experiences of those who lived through the earlier time. This is especially the case in regard to Anglo-American relations which in the memories of 1956 seem to have played a much lesser part than in subsequent analytical accounts. All this has led us to take, for the present at least, a rather different view of 1956. In the feature on that year which forms part of this issue we have brought together a number of memoirs of 1956 from very different perspectives – and not usually the expected ones. In the pieces by Rod Prince, Michael Wolfers, and Jean McCrindle we have the memories of three young Britons – one just finishing military service, one a schoolboy and one a youthful activist from a Communist Party background. They reflect inevitably their different ages, involvements and subsequent political development. McCrindle vividly portrays how her own disillusionment with the Communist Party after Hungary led, paradoxically, to a kind of liberation: the Hungarian Revolution...

1 de julio en el Somme (1916): Errores y logros del ejército británico en el peor día de su historia militar

1916 marked the year of stabilization on all fronts of the Great War. After the massacres in the fields of land and sea battle, mainly, the options to achieve a resolution of the conflict through adjudicative proceedings was minimized. From the horrors of war, the first day of the battle of the Somme will go down in history as the bloodiest day in British military history. Pressed by the French bleed, full pressed by allies and employing military tactics wrong, thousands of young Britons were taken to a certain death in the hitherto flowered files Somme River.

Adoption, Fostering, and the Poor

Adoption, Fostering, and the Poor Claudia Nelson (bio) In and after the 1860s (when Florence Hill used the phrase as the title of a book subtitled “the training of juvenile paupers”), destitute young Britons were often termed “the children of the state.” This de-emphasizing of the individual parent signals profound doubt of family life’s ability to eradicate the problems associated with impoverished children, who were seen either as embodying their forebears’ presumed irresponsibility and criminality or as being the victims of these traits in their caregivers. If reformers indefatigably missionized the poor through district visiting, mothers’ unions, Sunday schools, compulsory education, and more, much of the discussion surrounding the slum child in particular hinted that such efforts were doomed, not merely as long as children remained within the home of origin but perhaps even as long as they remained within any private home. One influential view, expressed at the very beginning of the Victorian era by James Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth) in The Training of Pauper Children (1839) and solidifying over the remainder of the century (Berry 38, 164), held that the impoverished family, a powerful rival to its middle-class counterpart because the poor were so numerous, had to be dispersed if society were to be improved. The solution proposed for children separated from such families was generally neither adoption nor foster care but institutionalization or transportation, child-size versions of the judicial system’s preferred methods for handling adult criminals. Lydia Murdoch argues that middle-class child welfare workers’ tendency to demonize the families of the poor was a way of “denying citizenship to large segments of the working, particularly urban, poor” as part of an effort to impose middle-class “notions of citizenship” (7). Similarly, I suggest that the frequent demonization of adoption among the poor sometimes imposed and sometimes dismissed middle-class notions of home and the family—in a culture that doubted that these notions could be spread throughout society as a whole. The anxiety and hostility that certain middle-class spokespeople directed toward adoptions involving the alien family configurations of the poor may be observed in many texts. [End Page 57] “Adoption” was a contested term in Victorian England. Reformers sometimes reserved it for the affluent; thus, muckraking journalist James Greenwood, writing on “‘Baby-Farmers’ and Advertising ‘Child Adopters’” in The Seven Curses of London (1869), usually puts the word in ironic quotation marks, sometimes preceding it with “mock,” when discussing fosterage by the poor. Greenwood concedes that the poor may call an arrangement “adoption,” but he asserts that more sophisticated and/or moral individuals would properly call it “baby farming” or, often, “child murder.” Sentences such as the following ensue: “It is these ‘adopters’ of children who should be specially looked after, since, assuming that heartless roguery is the basis of their business dealing, it becomes at once manifest that their main source of profit must lie in their ability to get rid of their hard bargains as soon as possible” by abandoning or killing the child (30). As with similar campaigns discussed by George Behlmer (82–84), it is plain that “adoption” in the sense of baby farming is the dark inversion of “adoption” in its reputable, middle-class sense. While Greenwood has some sympathy for birth mothers, who, he concedes, may genuinely try to make good arrangements for their children, he has none for caregivers. Even when no money changed hands, adoption arrangements among the poor were often viewed with deep suspicion. Greenwood acknowledges that “for one child taken from the streets in the highly respectable West-end, and privately housed and taken care of, there might be shown fifty who have found open door and lasting entertainment in the most poverty-stricken haunts of London” (31–32). Yet, even while he attributes these “open door[s]” to laudable pity for the helpless, the readiness of the “worst to do” (31) to house a homeless infant is a worse problem than the upper classes’ reluctance to help. As the once-appealing toddler develops (because of his environment, we learn) into an older child noteworthy for “mischievous cunning” and “audacious and tiresome” (32) ways, clubbing takes the place of...

Framing the Other: cosmopolitanism and the representation of difference in overseas gap year narratives

This paper engages with debates surrounding contemporary cosmopolitanism and the outcomes of cultural encounters. It considers if overseas gap years, often put forward in the UK as a way of becoming a global citizen, enable young Britons to 'broaden their mind'. I explore representations of the people and places encountered during these periods of time out through an analysis of young people's travel blogs. Four key themes are highlighted in these narratives: the exotic place; feeling 'out of place'; the importance and outcomes of local interaction; and the historical legacies that are implicated in constructing places as 'different'. Gappers display a willingness to interact with and gain knowledge about their host communities. Yet as gap years are designed to be distinct from the normal course of things, they also demonstrate the 'difference' of places. This can often result in the reproduction of established ways of representing the Other in order to frame them as meaningful. There is a tension in the narratives between 'globally reflexive' and 'globally reproductive' representations of difference, and I suggest that we might question the development of cosmopolitan attitudes and competencies through undertaking a gap year.

British Muslim Young People: Facts, Features and Religious Trends

Since the terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005, British Muslim young people have come under unprecedented public scrutiny. In the popular imagination the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘youth’ together most often trigger associations with violent extremism. The uninformed may be surprised to learn that the vast majority of Muslim young people have no interest in radical religious ideas but are more likely to be engaged in the everyday challenges of adolescence similar to those facing their non-Muslim peers, in addition to dealing with issues unique to their ‘Muslimness’. The paper is split into two sections. The first offers a broad overview of the socio-religious realities lived by young Muslim Britons. By highlighting prominent studies in the field, it delineates and summarises their distinct features, development of faith-based identities and the main issues challenging British Muslim young people. The second part draws upon the research of the author to provide a typology and analysis of the most dominant Islamic religious tendencies in the UK. I suggest that the complex forms of religious activism observable today are to a great extent a result of the work of youth movements prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s. Youth-oriented revivalist organisations such as The Young Muslims UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir, JIMAS and the ‘Traditional Islam’ networks have helped to mobilise religious revivalism among second- and third-generation British Muslim communities and continue to compete and evolve, learning in recent years how to reconcile the competing demands of religious authenticity and the obligations of citizenship.

Emociones en la oscuridad: Imagen y alfabetización mediática en jóvenes

This author deals with the attraction of that feeling of terror generated in the media, especially in cinema, and from the perspective of the controlled emotion behind that fear, pleasure and pain. What is the nature of the fear and pleasure the spectator feels? Why is it important for educators to take account of this connection between the viewer and the film? This subject is treated from film culture as experiecned by young Britons, with an analysis of the influence of cinema on the cultural lives of young people and the lessons that can be drawn. The author takes two young girls as an example, identifying their social identity and later outlining the state of education in cinema and the media. He presents two projects developed by young Britons on Psychosis and the creation of videogames. The author concludes that the fascinating world of moving images is open to us via films and videogames, by examining ludic structures and narratives and teaching students how these are interrelated and exploring their creative processes of production. El autor de este trabajo examina la atracción hacia el sentimiento de terror en los medios de comunicación, y especialmente en el cine, desde la perspectiva de la emoción contenida que genera el terror, lo angustioso y agradable… ¿Cuál es la naturaleza del miedo y el «placer» que se experimenta? ¿Por qué es importante que los educadores tengan en cuenta esta conexión que relaciona a los espectadores con la película? En este sentido, abordar el tema desde la perspectiva de la cultura cinematográfica de los jóvenes de Reino Unido, analizando la influencia del cine en la vida cultural de los jóvenes y cuál es la lección que deben obtener los educadores. Partiendo de una ejemplificación con dos chicas, en las que analiza sus identidades sociales, más tarde pasa a bosquejar la situación general de la educación en el cine y en los medios de comunicación, presentando brevemente dos investigaciones desarrolladas con jóvenes británicos sobre «Psicosis» y sobre creación de videojuegos. Concluye este autor que podemos introducirnos en el fascinante mundo de la imagen en movimiento a través de las películas y videojuegos, examinando las estructuras lúdicas y narrativas que existen, enseñando a los alumnos de qué forma se interrelacionan y explorando sus procesos creativos de producción.

Job guarantees – easing the pain of long‐term unemployment

Paul Gregg assesses the effectiveness of policies that use work experience for getting young Britons back into jobs and draws out some lessons for the design of the proposed ‘Young Person's Guarantee’

White British; dual heritage; British Muslim: Young Britons' conceptualisation of identity and citizenship

This paper examines young British people's conceptualisation of identity and citizenship. Data were gathered through a questionnaire survey from 442 young male and female citizens of majority and minority ethnic origins, aged 14–24 years and at different stages of education, employment and non‐employment. This was followed up by in‐depth interviews with a stratified sample of 40 participants. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, and by closely examining the two key concepts of identity and citizenship, the paper analyses the ways in which young Britons perceive their multiple identities and citizenship status. The research shows that education and career are the major priorities of these young people. They have clear notions of identity and citizenship and most are comfortable with their own identities and feelings of citizenship. However, some of those who are from a minority ethnic background have doubts about being viewed as British citizens because of racial harassment or stereotyping, particularly in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in the West. The research has implications for pedagogy, education policy, community cohesion and social justice.

A Dirty, Indolent, Priest-Ridden City: British Soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsular War, 1808-1813

Between 1808 and 1813 Lisbon was the gateway for British soldiers entering the Peninsular War. For many British soldiers the Iberian Peninsula was not only their first combat experience but also their first time abroad, with their military service as part of a broader experience of travel and cross-cultural contact. British letters, diaries and memoirs of the Peninsular War have long been used by historians as the basis for military and campaign histories; rarely have they been appreciated as travel and ethnographic accounts, allowing us to explore how British soldiers described, experienced and understood the foreign physical and cultural environments of Portugal and Spain. This article investigates British soldiers' attitudes to Lisbon and its inhabitants. Their writings illuminate the relationship between war, travel and identity; British views on Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula more generally; and the mentalities and cultural values of a broad cohort of young Britons in the early nineteenth century. Most soldiers wrote largely critical and hostile accounts of their time in Lisbon, identifying markers of cultural difference and in so doing revealing their own notions of what it meant to British and civilized.

Illicit Drug Use and Political Involvement Amongst Contemporary Young British Citizens: A Psychological Perspective

It has been argued that the apparent alienation of young Britons from involvement in conventional politics, as seen by their low turn out in the 2001 general election, may be partly due to the mismatch between their experience of, and attitudes towards, illicit drugs, and the traditional policies of the mainstream parties which have favoured their continued prohibition (e.g. Lilley, 2001). In the absence of direct evidence for such a relationship, other evidence from both the illicit drug use and political literatures respectively was examined from the viewpoint of the psychological mediation of behaviour in both areas. It was concluded that illicit drug use might not be regarded as normal behaviour by young people to the extent argued by some researchers, and that given the range of personal social meanings which users have been found to attach to this behaviour, great caution was needed when inferring social and political attitudes in this population. Important future research could include an examination of locus of control and self-efficacy beliefs, especially with those involved in active campaigning on drug related issues. Until such research is conducted, the hypothesised relationship between illicit drug use and political behaviour remains a matter of conjecture.

Young Britons switched on at 16

Young Britons switched on at 16