Search Results

Great Britain was the first country to reform its criminal abortion law with the Abortion Act of 1967, a law that was strict in form but liberal in practice. Active anti‐abortion forces sought to turn back the 1967 reform, putting movement activists in a position to defend the law on the books, and little opportunity to seek greater rights for women with respect to the abortion decisions. With occasional help of women's policy agencies, the women's movement actors were successful in defending legal abortion through the 1990s. The key to their success was the openness of the policy process through private member bills in parliament and commitment of feminist MPs in the Labour party.

This chapter shows the professionalization of the political class in Great Britain, a country that until the early 1970s was dominated by the amateur politician. Both major parties in Britain, the Conservatives and the Labour Party, created the crucial preconditions for the emergence and establishment of the political class, and it was in their interest to accelerate the process of professional i zation. Basic conditions have been carried through the steady increase of MPs’ salaries since the 1970s, an expansion of political occupations, and different mechanisms for career maintenance. Moreover, previous institutional reforms have not changed the composition of the p o litical class as much as they have strengthened the process of professionalization of the existing political class. Newly developed political networks within different policy areas foster the development of the career politician, who early in his or her career e n ters politics and wants to stay there; the networks facilitate both entry into politics and maint e nance within the political class.

This chapter shows how Great Britain, sometimes described as having a ‘weak’ immigration control policy compared to continental Europe, has in fact displayed an exceptionally strong stance. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty and common law restraints have neutralized the courts as effective opponents of the executive, resulting in absolute Home Office control over immigration policy. Even family reunification and asylum‐granting decisions have been reduced to a trickle.

The UK has tried to address the problem of immigrant integration through a mixture of a restrictive immigration policy and a liberal race‐relations policy. Its central consensus has been attacked at the level of local politics by a militant anti‐racist left and a nationalist ‘anti‐anti‐racist’ right, and is now further threatened by pressures from the minorities themselves, which show the limits of an approach to integration that focuses on race at the expense of other group markers. In particular, Muslim demands (for example, in relation to separate Islamic schools and book‐banning) illustrate the limits of multiculturalism in a liberal state.

The overall levels of social capital in Great Britain appear to have remained robust since the 1950s. However, disparities in the social capital available to the working and middle classes appear to have widened. Government policies on education and social service delivery have been central to sustaining levels of social capital.

This chapter considers whether the accommodation of national minorities through the according of self-government at the regional level undermines the welfare state. Most Western states with sizeable national minorities have accommodated minority nationalist aspirations through some form of federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy. This chapter examines the impact of this sort of devolution or regionalization on the welfare state in the UK, Belgium, and Canada. The chapter concludes that such institutional reforms have had complex effects on social policy, both at the central level and in the self-governing regions. It has set in play political dynamics that sometimes work to strengthen social policy as a tool of nation-building, and sometimes serve to inhibit new redistributive policies. As a result, no simple general patterns leap out, challenging assertions that accommodating substate nationalism inevitably weakens the welfare state.

In the first section, the analysis defines the general feminist aims and parameters of the sub‐area of Equal Employment Policy. It then discusses the range and timing of policies found in the 13 countries and closes with a discussion of the criteria for selecting the four policy cases covered in the chapter. Equal employment policy consists of government action that addresses the full range of barriers in the paid labour market that prevent women from participating in employment in the same manner as men. The major focal points of equal employment policies are employment decisions and the processes surrounding them on hiring, training, wages, promoting, and firing. In the second section, the results of the analysis of the policy case literature on the dynamics of feminist policy formation is presented for the following four cases: Discrimination Policy in the 1977 Act in Ireland; Nordic Catch‐all Policy in the 1979 Swedish Act; The 1983 Equal Value Amendment in Great Britain; and positive action in the 1983 Egalité Professionnelle Act in France. The analysis concludes that the most important factors in determining feminist policy success in this particular sub‐sector of feminist policy may be strategic partnerships between equality agencies, trade unions, and women in public office, authoritative equality agencies, and European Union equality policy.

This chapter explores the lack of success of the extreme right in Great Britain. Fascist leanings were kept in check in the 1930s, when a fascist party was formed, and in the post-war years when right extremists tried to obtain political relevance. Right extremist parties never benefited from full political legitimacy, and their attachment to the traditional fascist mould precipitated their demise.

This chapter examines the history of Irish immigrants in Great Britain during the period from 1871 to 1921. The Irish who came to Britain in the 1870s were mainly reluctant immigrants, and they were mostly transient people. Many of those who stayed in Britain experienced virtual exclusion from secure employment and housing. The warped occupational distribution of the immigrants was reflected in their housing and patterns of settlement. In the following fifty years, though the acuteness of immigrant estrangement abated, there was no complete transformation of the Irish in Britain into either an expatriate community or a fully accepted ingredient of British society.

This chapter shows how economic growth over the last two business cycles has been distributed in the United States, and compares those changes with changes in two EU countries with quite different social Institutions: Great Britain and Germany. While income inequality is consistently highest in the United States over the past two decades, followed by Great Britain and Germany, income inequality in the United States changed little in the 1990s, fell in Great Britain, and rose in Germany. Outcomes in Great Britain over the 1990s business cycle are much closer to those in the United States than they are to Germany.

This chapter looks at the most successful effort to build an alliance of the kind described in the previous chapter: the anti-fascist alliance built by Jawaharlal Nehru and parts of the Labour left, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in the late 1930s. Nehru's greater success in alliance-building in Britain is analysed and explained, and the organizational consequences of his approach — in particular the growing strength of V. K. Krishna Menon's India League, and the anti-fascist agreement co-sponsored by Stafford Cripps in 1938 — are traced. The chapter goes on to examine and explain the difficulties Nehru encountered in delivering the Indian side of the bargain in the early years of the Second World War, the failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942, and the consequent fragmentation of metropolitan anti-imperialism.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the history of verse recitation and poetry memorization in Great Britain and the United States and how their societies have come to perceive such practices, as well as the role poetry plays within both the British and American imaginary. It also provides an overview of the case studies to be undertaken in this volume, and the ways in which they will be approached for study. In addition, the chapter goes on to embark on brief explorations of the felt, internal aspects of memorized poetry in British and American society. These, as the chapter attempts to show, combine to tell a story that both augments and to an extent challenges the arguments put forward elsewhere in this book.

This chapter considers how economic crises led to the breakthrough of transatlantic neoliberal politics in the 1970s. As Great Britain and the United States experienced stagflation—the combination of high unemployment, high inflation, and low or no growth—political leaders and policymakers cast around for serious alternative economic policies to Keynesian demand management. The end of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, two oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979, the Vietnam War, the Watergate break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C., Great Britain's International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan of 1976, the virtual collapse of British industrial relations, and the failure of the prices and income policies that were supposed to fight inflation in both countries all created a policy vacuum into which neoliberal ideas flowed.

This chapter illustrates a slow transformation in affordable housing and urban policy between the 1960s and the 1990s in both the United States and Great Britain. Housing and urban policy for low- and moderate-income groups was one of the few social policy areas where the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had a positive program to counter what they saw as a culture of dependency created by the welfare state. The problem of how to help disadvantaged people and poor communities was to be addressed through incentives, deregulation, and the creation and stimulation of opportunities in the private market. However, the majority of capable individuals and families would prosper instead as the forces of competition and private enterprise were unleashed in poorer areas.

This chapter presents a detailed comparative analysis of firms and network structures in Germany and Great Britain. It focuses on the degree of ownership concentration, the different types of owners, and the differences in the configuration of corporate networks, as well as competition and cooperation in the network. The concept of network configuration is explained, and national networks are compared in terms of ownership concentration and the overlap of capital networks and interlocking directorates. The overlap of interlocks and ownership and the mutual reinforcement of bureaucratic power (management) and power conveyed by ownership characterize the specific control structure of German capitalism.

Western Europe was an early adopter of computers, beginning during World War II. This chapter explains the adoption and role of computing in Great Britain, France and West Germany from the 1940s to the dawn of the twenty-first century, explaining the active role played by national governments and the local information processing industries in the process. It provides new data on the amount of diffusion and its causes, relying on IBM’s corporate archives. It explains why these countries failed to lead in the IT expansion around the world, failed “national champion” programs and the effects of scale economics and public policy. It concludes with a description of how these European societies viewed the coming of a teledense society.