Rock Against Racism (RAR) was a mass anti-racist movement that used rock concerts as a medium through which to organise resistance to the British far-right. One of RAR's most distinctive features was its strong visual identity, which drew heavily upon the art and graphics of early twentieth-century radical cultures, but was also influenced by punk graphics, pop art and the availability of new printing technologies. To understand RAR, the author details some of the contextual issues, such as the decline of post-war consensus, and the politics of despair. The collapse of consensus in the 1970s was hastened by economic and ideological crises that shattered many people's dreams of progress and prosperity and the Keynesian world view upon which they were based. Up until this point a degree of complacency regarding Britain's social and economic prospects was evident in certain quarters.

The BBC played a special role in society and was distinct because of its status as a public service corporation; its nature and purpose were intimately bound to the idea of the nation and rooted in its history of projecting and preserving national culture. From its founding in 1922 until its monopoly was broken in 1954, the BBC was the central site in Britain where national identity was produced, projected and contested. The BBC's national networks, the pre-war National Programme and the post-war Light Programme, reached nearly every corner of the British Isles. Empire programmes reminded Britons of their shared heritage and destiny. The BBC continues to serve the national interests at all points, throughout the wide range of every diverse activity and the enjoyment which broadcasting can reflect and rouse. It remains responsible for overseas services, which broadcast to the world on behalf of Britain.

This chapter details the history of the institution of mandatory electoral participation, tracing the idea back to medieval times and showing how it has developed in the modern state. It goes on to examine common reasons why compulsory electoral participation has been introduced and it closes with an overview of the contemporary use of this institution for elections to lower or only houses of parliament.

This chapter discusses social problems in the West Indies during the second half of the eighteenth century. Just as Scotland experienced great challenges and stresses in the second half of the eighteenth century so too did the West Indies. The most profound disjunctions lay between the free white residents and the communities of enslaved blacks and free people of colour and this manifested itself in the maintenance of a colour bar that determined the rights that were enjoyed or denied and the kind of employment that was undertaken. This chapter considers the scale of Scottish involvement in miscegenation and describes the ways in which Scots reacted to fathering illegitimate mixed-race children.

This chapter examines in detail Keith Joseph's arguments for inequality, assessing their validity and consistency. Joseph's defence of inequality was a radical departure in post-war British politics. In addition to the conflict between freedom and community on the one hand and equality on the other, a further philosophical objection raised by Joseph to egalitarianism was the lack of a moral basis for fiscal redistribution. The trickle-down theory was acceptable to Joseph only because he drew a categorical distinction between absolute and relative poverty. Much of Joseph's thesis was negative in the sense that it sought to reject the post-war consensus of welfare rights, equality and a positive conception of liberty. In the longer term there were two distinctive, and mostly valid, critiques of Joseph's anti-egalitarianism from the Labour revisionists and from One Nation Conservatives.

This chapter deals with important theoretical issues that are particularly pertinent to the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP's) relationship with Rock Against Racism (RAR). These cover three areas: the theory of state capitalism, the relationship between the party and the working class, and the united front. It examines the state of the SWP, formerly the International Socialists (IS), during the mid- to late 1970s. The chapter suggests how the SWP attempted to relate its theory to events in the world at large and how these events, in turn, shaped the party's interventions. To gain an insight into the SWP's attitude to RAR, it is useful to examine the party's internal discussion documents. These offer a forum in which political perspectives are discussed with little need to make concessions to populism and public perceptions.

The majority of those currently living in Gibraltar, and many of the Gibraltar-born who live outside, regard themselves as Gibraltarians, with a culture and identity sufficiently distinctive in their eyes to qualify Gibraltar as a nation. This chapter examines the demographic roots of Gibraltarian identity during the period 1704–1819. It argues that the most important phase for the emergence of the distinctive contribution of demography to Gibraltarian identity was the first century or so of British political control. It was then that the transfer of territorial sovereignty to Britain was secured and, just as important, confirmed, and in the same period substantial numbers of people from several places of origin sought to enter and settle. After considering war and the partition of Gibraltar during 1704–1705, the chapter describes opportunities for immigrants, military security and surveillance, censuses on British Protestants and the others in 1725–1816, and property ownership from 1712 to 1819.

This introductory chapter discusses the objective of this volume, which is to scrutinise the nature of the interplay between hegemonic discourses and national institutional settings with a focus on globalisation in Greece and Ireland. This volume aspires to explicate the conditions of the existence of hegemonic discourses and the relationship developed between these discourses and national social milieux. It also analyses the nature of hegemonic discourses and evaluates their validity as an analytical tool for studying change and continuity in world politics and economics.

This chapter analyses the effects of the Partito Comunista Italiano's (PCI) negative engagement with the mass movements for the party itself as well as the movements. The history of the 1972–7 cycle of contention demonstrates that processes of innovation, diffusion and engagement can be driven by illegal and violent tactics, as well as by protest tactics which are no more than rowdy. It also shows that the engagement phase is a contingent political process, whose outcome depends on the actions of the gatekeeper rather than on the nature of the innovations of the cycle. This chapter also discusses the lessons that can be learned about the interaction between social movements and the ‘gatekeeper’ parties.

This chapter shows that Afrikaners developed a theology that fused a virulent racism to a ‘strong state’ which they successfully manipulated to address the ‘poor white problem’. Afrikaners, in other words, sought to protect impoverished whites by making Social Gospelism the very business of the state itself.

Events surrounding the Carrigan Committee and the presentation of its report suggest that the assumptions, beliefs and behaviors related to sexual morality in post-independence Ireland were complex. The Catholic hierarchy opposed adoption on several grounds, and no administration was willing to cross the church on this issue. Adoption by an American family under American adoption laws provided the only alternative to institutional life or an insecure informal adoption or fostering arrangement in Ireland. The adoption of legitimate children presented a challenge in the context of the government's conceptualization of ‘normal’ or appropriate family composition. The evolution of Ireland's adoption process up to 1952 reveals the yawning schism between the republican ideal to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally,’ and the way the state dealt with children who for whatever reason could not be cared for and protected by their own biological parents.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about impostors and impostures in early modern England. The first part of this book analyses the phenomenon and its variety, and explores incidents showing the common characteristics of imposture, and to whom and why the labels impostor and imposture were applied; and the second examines the life of William Fuller, who assumed different elite roles during his lifetime.

Historical institutionalism provides a useful lens through which to view the events surrounding reform of the House of Lords in the past century. Executives have successfully argued for the restriction of the powers of the Lords in order to preserve their own position inside parliament. The democratic legitimacy argument has been inverted in order to prevent reforms designed to make the Lords a more effective chamber, and discourse surrounding the reform debate has been underpinned by the normative argument regarding the pre-eminence of the Commons. The pre-eminence argument reflects the norms and values of the executive in particular, rather than the Commons in general. This chapter looks at the reform of the House of Lords in the years between 1900 and 1997. It also discusses the election of the Liberal Party to government in 1906 and the Parliament Act of 1911, the 1917 Bryce Conference held to consolidate parliamentary reform, the Labour Party's rise to power in 1945 and the Parliament Act of 1949, and the Life Peerages Act of 1958.