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Author: Ivor Crewe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1995-11-02
Total Pages: 522
ISBN-13: 9780521499651
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe information presented covers a wide range of topics in voting and public opinion including the vote, turnout, party membership, partisanship, and attitudes on issues such as abortion, capital punishment and nationalisation.
Author: Clive D. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-12-09
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0192666029
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCounting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020, the fourth volume in the author's chronological history of British secularization, sheds significant new light on the nature, scale, and timing of religious change in Britain during the past half-century, with particular reference to quantitative sources. Adopting a key performance indicators approach, twenty-one facets of personal religious belonging, behaving, and believing are examined, offering a much wider range of lenses through which the health of religion can be viewed and appraised than most contemporary scholarship. Summative analysis of these indicators, by means of a secularization dashboard, leads to a reaffirmation of the validity of secularization (in its descriptive sense) as the dominant narrative and direction of travel since 1970, while acknowledging that it is an incomplete process and without endorsing all aspects of the paradigmatic expression of secularization as a by-product of modernization.
Author: Jamie L. Bronstein
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2012-02-20
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 1405181818
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEMPIRE, STATE, AND SOCIETY “This book captures the broad-sweep of modern British history. Bronstein and Harris’s narrative is distinguished by its comprehensive coverage, readability, and sure judgment. It is an excellent book.” James Epstein, Vanderbilt University “This is a well-structured and gracefully written textbook that undergraduates at American universities and colleges should find highly accessible. It integrates recent scholarly trends into a compelling narrative that brings together metropolitan and imperial themes. These themes are illuminated by well-chosen anecdotes that make them come alive. Bronstein and Harris have provided an excellent introduction to modern Britain and its Empire, and one that deserves a wide readership.” Phil Harling, University of Kentucky In the nineteenth century, Great Britain was a world-recognized superpower. Tremendous economic growth fostered a daunting formal empire, global networks of trade and investment, and a formidable military. By the late twentieth century this position of dominance had eroded significantly under the stress of two world wars, rising nationalist movements, shifting geopolitics, and the transformation to a post-industrial economy. As Britain adjusts to her new place in the post-colonial world, Empire, State, and Society assesses the external and internal forces behind these transformations. The authors draw on the most recent scholarship to give due importance to social, economic, and cultural changes as well as politics and international diplomacy. Divided into chapters both chronologically and thematically, Empire, State, and Society enables detailed exploration of issues such as race, gender, religion, and the environment. In doing so, the book provides an accessible, comprehensive, and balanced introduction to British history.
Author: Brian Harrison
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-03-26
Total Pages: 688
ISBN-13: 0191606782
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this, the first of two self-standing volumes bringing The New Oxford History of England up to the present, Brian Harrison begins in 1951 with much of the empire intact and with Britain enjoying high prestige in Europe. The United Kingdom could still then claim to be a great power, whose welfare state exemplified compromise between Soviet planning and the USA’s free market. When the volume ends in 1970, no such claims carried conviction. The empire had gone, central planning was in trouble, and even the British political system had become controversial. In an unusually wide-ranging, yet impressively detailed volume, Harrison approaches the period from unfamiliar directions. He explains how British politicians in the 1950s and 1960s responded to this transition by pursuing successive roles for Britain: worldwide as champion of freedom, and in Europe as exemplar of parliamentary government, the multi-racial society, and economic planning. His main focus, though, rests not on the politicians but on the decisions the British people made largely for themselves: on their environment, social structure and attitudes, race relations, family patterns, economic framework, and cultural opportunities. By 1970 the consumer society had supplanted postwar austerity, the socialist vision was fading, and 'the sixties' (the theme of his penultimate chapter) had introduced new and even exotic themes and values. Having lost an empire, Britain was still resourcefully seeking a role: it had yet to find it.
Author: James E. Cronin
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-17
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 1317873912
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhere other books are either highly partisan dismissals or appreciations of the Third Way, or dull sociological accounts, this book gets behind the clichés in order to show just what is left of Labour party ideology and what the future may hold. New Labour has changed the face of Britain. Culture, class, education, health, the arts, leisure, the economy have all seen seismic shifts since the 1997 election that raised Blair to power. The Labour that rules has distanced itself from the failed Labour of the 70s and 80s, but the core remains. Labour remains gripped by its own past - unable and unwilling to shed its ties to the old Labour party, but determined to avoid the mistakes of which lead to four electoral defeats between 1979 and 1992. Cronin covers the full history of the party from its post war triumph through decades of shambolic leadership against ruthless and organised opposition to the resurgent New Labour of the 90s that finally took Britain into the new millennium.
Author: Brian Harrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-09
Total Pages: 679
ISBN-13: 0192543997
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1970 the 'cold war' was still cold, Northern Ireland's troubles were escalating, the UK's relations with the EEC were unclear, and corporatist approaches to the economy precariously persisted. By 1990 Communism was crumbling world-wide, Thatcher's economic revolution had occurred, terrorism in Northern Ireland was waning, 'multi-culturalism' was in place, family structures were changing fast, and British political institutions had become controversial. Seven analytic chapters pursue these changes and accumulate rich detail on changes in international relations, landscape and townscape, social framework, family and welfare structures, economic policies and realities, intellect and culture, politics and government. The concluding chapter ranges chronologically even more widely to bring out the interaction of past and present, then asks how far the UK had by 1990 identified its world role. Like Harrison's Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951-1970 (2009) - the immediately preceding volume in this series - Finding a Role? includes a full chronological table and an ample index of names and themes. This, the first thorough, wide-ranging, and synoptic study of the UK so far published on this period, has two overriding aims: to show how British institutions evolved, but also to illuminate changes in the British people: their hopes and fears, values and enjoyments, failures and achievements. It therefore equips its readers to understand events since 1990, and so to decide for themselves where the UK should now be going.
Author: Clive D. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-16
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0192520032
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSecularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain provides a major empirical contribution to the literature of secularization. It moves beyond the now largely sterile and theoretical debates about the validity of the secularization thesis or paradigm. Combining historical and social scientific perspectives, Clive D. Field uses a wide range of quantitative sources to probe the extent and pace of religious change in Britain during the long 1960s. In most cases, data is presented for the years 1955-80, with particular attention to the methodological and other challenges posed by each source type. Following an introductory chapter, which reviews the historiography, introduces the sources, and defines the chronological and other parameters, Field provides evidence for all major facets of religious belonging, behaving, and believing, as well as for institutional church measures. The work engages with, and largely refutes, Callum G. Brown's influential assertion that Britain experienced 'revolutionary' secularization in the 1960s, which was highly gendered in nature, and with 1963 the major tipping-point. Instead, a more nuanced picture emerges with some religious indicators in crisis, others continuing on an existing downward trajectory, and yet others remaining stable. Building on previous research by the author and other scholars, and rejecting recent proponents of counter-secularization, the long 1960s are ultimately located within the context of a longstanding gradualist, and still ongoing, process of secularization in Britain.
Author: Geoffrey Evans
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 1999-04-28
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780761960201
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDid Labour's landslide victory in 1997 mark a critical watershed in British party politics? Did the radical break with 18 years of Conservative rule reflect a fundamental change in the social and ideological basis of British voting behaviour? Critical Elections brings together leading scholars of parties, elections and voting behaviour to provide the first systematic overview of long-term change in British electoral politics.
Author: Robin Blackburn
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2020-05-05
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 1789609232
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBanking on Death offers a panoramic view of the history and future of pension provision. A work of unique scope, it traces the origins and development of the pension idea, from the days of the French Revolution to the troubles of the modern welfare state. As we live longer, employers are closing their pension schemes and many claim that public treasuries will not be able to cope with the retirement of the babyboomers. Banking on Death analyses the challenge facing public schemes and the malfunctioning of private retirement provision, concluding with a bold proposal for how to pay for decent pensions for all. Robin Blackburn argues that pension funds have been depleted by wasteful promotion and used as gambling chips by ruthless and overpaid top executives. This is the world of 'grey capitalism,' where employees' savings are sequestrated from them and pressed into the service of corporate aggrandisement. Even the best companies find it hard to run a business and a pension fund at the same time-especially when the latter is larger than the former. The fund managers' notorious short-termism and herd instinct, and their failure to curb the greed and irresponsibility of the corporate elite, lead to obscene inequalities and a blighted social landscape. The pension privatisation lobby, Blackburn shows, has lost major battles in France and Germany, the United States and Italy, because of the popular fears it evokes. And the case for privatisation looks intellectually threadbare after withering critiques from such notable theorists as Joseph Stiglitz and Pierre Bourdieu. Banking on Death shows that pensions are political dynamite, and have undone governments from France and Italy to Argentina. Popular outcries led Reagan, Clinton, and Blair to change tack: will this happen to George W. Bush too? Blackburn argues that the ageing society will generate increased costs but, so long as the new life course is properly financed, all age groups will gain. He proposes a public regime of asset-based welfare, drawing on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Rudolf Meidner, that could ensure secondary pensions for all and foster a more responsible, egalitarian and humane pattern of economic development.
Author: Jon Lawrence
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-03-26
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 0191567760
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this engagingly written history of electioneering in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present, Jon Lawrence explores the changing relationship between politicians and public. Throughout this period, he argues, British politics has been characterized by bruising public rituals intended to bestow legitimacy on politicians by obliging them to face an often irreverent public on broadly equal terms. Face-to-face interaction was central both to the disorderly civic rituals of eighteenth-century politics, and to the Victorian and Edwardian election meeting. Perhaps surprisingly, it also survived in pretty rude health between the wars, despite the emergence of the new mass communication media of radio and cinema. But the same cannot be said of the post-war era and the rise of television. Today most politicians are content merely to offer the semblance of meaningful engagement - walkabouts, canvassing and meetings are all designed to ensure that most senior politicians come into contact only with the smiling faces of that dwindling band, the 'party faithful'. Lloyd George and Churchill might have relished the rough and tumble of a tumultuous public meeting, but their modern counterparts tend to be more risk-averse (and not without reason, given that the cameras are always present to capture their mishaps). But this is not another nostalgic lament for a lost 'golden age'. On the contrary, Electing Our Masters argues that politicians frequently still crave the kudos to be derived from bruising encounters with an irreverent public - hence Tony Blair's so-called 'masochism strategy' in the 2005 election campaign, with its succession of gruelling sessions before live studio audiences. As Lawrence points out, the vital question for today is: can we persuade our broadcasters that such encounters must form a staple of modern, mediated politics?
