This chapter focuses on a campus meeting with a controversial Palestinian journalist at which escalating accusations of anti-Semitism and fascism culminated in physical violence. Drawing on the work of Simon Critchley, I frame this event as a ‘tragic’ conflict, in which the claims of entangled past and present sufferings came to be expressed as a passionate refusal of recognition. Attending closely to the linguistic, somatic and emotional dynamics of this meeting, I show how it culminated in the destabilisation of moral distinctions and the collapsing of spatial and temporal boundaries, including a blurring of distinctions between victims and perpetrators, a making-present of past traumas and of seemingly distant forms of violence. Drawing on interview material to deepen my psychosocial analysis, I explore how repressed feelings of shame and aggressive desires, associated with these entanglements, came to be acted out in the violent culmination of this meeting. The concluding section draws this analysis together with the preceding chapter to develop an explanation for the repetitive, circular quality of melodramatic and tragic campus conflicts over time, including the role of public media and the logics of spectatorship in this process.

This chapter examines how a religion like Islam and its rise to prominence has become a covert way to talk about race. This is both historically true and is being practiced in contemporary Europe. Islam has served as a category which combines religious and ethnic otherness. Fictive ethnicity has found a convenient opponent in the fictive otherness Islam represents. Islam has become useful shorthand for conflicting policies and exclusionary rhetoric, challenging the impulse to inclusion and assimilation in these countries.

This chapter follows the process from January 1998 to the much delayed publication of the draft bill in 1999. The FOI bill ‘swapped’ policy team and, at this point, shifted the source of policy drive. With no internal champions the push came from a combination of the legislature, the media and the government’s own waning sense of duty to its manifesto.The chapter focuses on the growing internal pressure from within the government to change the FOI commitment. Irvine’s combative approach led to short term success but a lack of consensus for moving forward. The proposed policy was threatening to key politicians and officials but also vulnerable due to the flaws within it. As Irvine’s radical plans stalled, senior figures, including the Prime Minister had growing doubts about the policy. Flaws in the White Paper were used to revise and weaken the policy while the fading power of the radical FOI group was reduced by Lord Irvine’s own personal loss of influence.The key moment came in 1998 when FOI was transferred from supporter Irvine to sceptic Jack Straw and the Cabinet Office team broken up. This led to a much more detailed but much weaker draft FOI bill, which inserted a veto power for government and reduced the power of the independent reviewer. The original proposals were modified within the Cabinet committee. Yet the bill survived in part due to the insertion of a ‘five year’ implementation gap and the government’s lukewarm commitment to its reform agenda. However, the bill was not a wholesale watering down, as it added Parliament to the Act’s coverage.

In the 1960s the Daily Mirror ran a weekly feature offering financial and investment advice about stocks and shares and it dealt with thousands of letters a year about financial matters from readers who found its advice more accessible and less intimidating than speaking to financial professionals. The social optimism of the sixties dissipated in the 1970s, however, as the economic situation deteriorated and the Daily Mirror’s financial advice had to adapt to a climate in which its own circulation was declining and as its core readership started to age the column became more conservative, dealing with queries from older readers and worries about unemployment, and focusing more on ‘mitigating’ the effects of inflation and redundancy payments. Porter argues that the Daily Mirror had, in fact, misinterpreted its readers’ interest in ‘popular capitalism’ during full employment and rising living standards in the 1960s, when its advocacy of financial investment reflected contemporary beliefs that the values and aspirations of the working-class were changing, with greater opportunities to borrow, save and spend. As he points out, its financial journalists were forced over time to adapt to more pragmatic queries about family budgeting and personal savings rather than focusing on larger investments.

This chapter provides a brief history of the campus politics of Palestine-Israel in Britain alongside a genealogical account of how the stakes, boundaries and grammars of these struggles have been represented in the media, policy interventions and research. Taking up Nancy Fraser’s emphasis on the injustices produced by framings of justice, I show how these public representations have made liberal, secular and nationalist assumptions so that they have been unable to account for the limits of consensus or attend to students’ complex investments in the Palestine-Israel conflict. In the process, I situate these campus struggles in relation to historically evolving relations within British society, the emergent geo-politics of the ‘War on Terror’, and the legacies of the Holocaust and British imperialism. Finally, I consider how public constructions of this as an ‘imported’, ‘ethno-religious’ conflict have failed to address the role played by the British university in shaping these dynamics. I discuss how, in a post-imperial, globalising world, universities in Britain have become conflicted in their public role, creating different challenges for institutions operating in a fragmented higher education field. I conclude by explaining my multi-sited approach in this study, describing my selection of case study institutions and introducing these field-sites.

The conclusion addresses the issue of why FOI survived, despite a lack of public interest. The UK FOI policy proceeded in distinct stages: an inside struggle followed by an external/internal conflict. The initial success of the White Paper was driven by insiders, rather than outside influence, aided by a particular context and the ignorance or disinterest of many key figures. In the later stages the drivers were very different as a complex interplay of factors kept FOI ‘alive’ as a policy. Government commitment to its manifesto generally and Blair’s public commitment to FOI helped ‘lock-in’ the government to some form of legislation when Parliament and the media applied pressure.The chapter will briefly examine the UK legislation’s performance since 2000 across various parts of government. Drawing on academic studies (Worthy 2010: Worthy et al 2011) and official analysis (Justice 2012) it looks at the use and impact of FOI. It ends by looking at whether the fears of opponents and the hopes of supporters have come to pass.

Looking at how the UK is imagined as a queer haven, this chapter contends that homonationalist discourses need victims to actualise their narrative opposing barbarism abroad to modernity at home. It also means that LGBT asylum becomes an important strategic space for social actors to invest in, as it allows for the deployment of axiological discourses using sexual modernity as a criterion: political credit can be won by claiming to save those queers that are persecuted in their home countries. Finally and most importantly, considering that homonationalist discourse works on the assumption that queerness and race are fragmented, where one is the enemy of the other, and where queer migrants and queers of colour are either exceptions or victims, the chapter concludes by looking at how homonationalism has become a regime of justification for public action, and is used strategically by advocacy groups to call the state to account.