The chapter first describes how deportation is actually arranged between the UK and Jamaican governments, before discussing the Open Arms Drop in Centre and the National Organization of Deported Migrants (NODM), two local NGOs whose work supporting deported migrants is made possible by UK aid funds. Both Open Arms and NODM were funded through Official Development Assistance, as part of the Reintegration and Rehabilitation Programme. This means that to situate deportation in wider political context, we need to think about contemporary meanings of development. The chapter shows that contemporary UK development policy is centrally preoccupied with security, bordering and trade, all of which concern the management of mobilities. Immigration controls should therefore be considered in relation to the wider government of mobility, which can advance our understanding of the connection between race, citizenship and mobility discussed in the previous chapter. In short, race and racism are constituted by relations of mobility, and this insight allows us to better describe racism in our times.

This chapter examines how Parliament controls its own proceedings, drawing on its power of exclusive cognisance and article 9 of the Bill of the Rights, and how it seeks to exert its authority in ensuring those outside Parliament comply with its summons to attend and give evidence. It addresses the role of the courts in determining the scope of exclusive cognisance and what constitutes proceedings in Parliament, and the potential - occasionally realised - of clashes between Parliament and the courts. It draws out reforms proposed to enforce the use of parliamentary privilege and the extent to which change is likely.

Early Modern English perspectives on the conquest of Ireland reflected broad humanist ideals about just conquest and colonialism that were emerging within debates between continental humanists and traditional Spanish scholastics concerning the Spanish conquest of the New World. For example, the focus on Irish behaviour in works by John Derricke and Edmund Spenser, in particular their characterisation of the Irish as nomadic brigands, were influenced to some extent by early sixteenth-century humanist accounts of the Amerindians. This chapter considers Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581) within the context of religious and humanist debates on the conquest and settlement of the New World and the contemporary representation of New World inhabitants. Ultimately, it shows that the terms of the debates concerning the reform of ‘unnatural’ New World polities were reproduced, albeit in modified form, within the Irish context, allowing writers such as Derricke and Spenser to condemn native Irish barbarism from the perspective of natural law while also identifying a clear path to reform.

argues that the motor force of the corporation is driven by the necessity for capital to reproduce itself. And as part of this ongoing reproduction of capital, corporations are involved in a continual struggle to overcome nature’s limits. It shows that the capitalist corporation was absolutely central to the long project of European colonisation; the corporation became the primary vehicle used by investors and by colonising governments to devour nature and human labour. The extraction of natural resources, particularly from colonised lands, was done on a scale and at a rate that would not have been possible without the colonial corporation. If the architecture of the corporation made it ideal for colonial adventure, its current forms are designed for neo-colonialism. This adaptation of the modern corporation has expanded its capacity to devour nature, as if there were no limits to the exploitation of nature itself

In Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (2000), Alan Fletcher offers the possibility of variant readings of a provocative section of one of John Derricke’s more notorious woodcuts. Though Fletcher does not expressly claim that the behavior of the two bare-bummed kerns in the lower right corner of the third plate of Derricke’s Discoverie is designedly flatulent rather than excremental, his exhaustive knowledge of the varied ensemble of entertainments on offer in early modern Irish banquet settings leads him to qualify the grosser form of negative ethnic stereotyping in which Derricke may be engaging. In the process of rebalancing the bias of uncivil defecators in favor of slightly more civil braigetori, this chapter explores more broadly Derricke’s strategic acts of misrepresentation which operate both on the level of idealization (of Sir Henry Sidney and his fellow Englishmen) and of demonization (of the Irish): aesthetic determinations that appeal to already ethnocentrically established English values of religious and cultural superiority, on the one hand, while promoting or intensifying the application of those values to the English reader’s understanding of Ireland and the native Irish, on the other.

argues that regulation in capitalist societies has a dual function. On one hand, it demands the promotion of a “political economy of speed” that prioritises economic growth, and on the other hand, it demands control of activities that are harmful to the environment. It is this contradiction that makes some people pessimistic about our reliance on states to protect, and indeed frames the commentary to the original 1973 formulation of the crime of ecocide. To have a law of ecocide on the statute books would only be significant if it was accompanied by the control or banning of the full range of commercial activities that are currently licenced. But even then, a series of prosecutions against senior individuals, or indeed against a corporation itself, is not going to precipitate the shift in the structure of the economic system that we need. The effective regulation of ecocide requires that we control the start-point of production and distribution of things – not just change the pace of the political economy of speed.

Analysing the membership of the House of Lords is not as straightforward a task as it might at first appear. During the passage of the House of Lords Bill in 1999 there was some debate over whether the proposed exclusion of Scottish hereditary peers involved a breach of the Act of Union. The sovereign, on the advice of the prime minister, formally confers all peerages. There is no statutory limit on the number of new peerages, just as there is no limit on the size of the House of Lords. There are several significant ways in which the membership of the House of Lords differs from that of the House of Commons. In terms of occupational background, gender and ethnicity the differences are not great. The House of Lords does mobilise into parliamentary activity a range of people who would never be likely to enter the Commons.