This chapter begins by trying to explain the rather sorry saga of Lords reform under Labour. This involves some retrospective examination of Labour's emerging policy on the Lords prior to 1997, and an analysis of the rather twisted course of events since then. The chapter offers some discussion of the major ideas for reform that have been considered over this period, before finally trying briefly to locate the whole debate in the wider context of parliamentary reform and the position of parliament in relation to government and society. If primacy in this constitutional sense belongs to the first chamber, the second principle that must be recognised in relation to Lords reform is that some real formal power must remain with the second chamber. Finally, the reform of the Lords needs to go with the grain of other constitutional change.

This chapter contends that the period from 1990 to 2003 was one of the lost opportunities. It shows how the three countries shared threat perceptions that could lead to a relationship improvement. However, the triangle turned into a ‘romantic triangle’ instead, in which the Saudi–Iranian rapprochement materialised, but Iran and the United States failed to reconcile. The chapter presents the Gulf War as altering the balance of power and, by exploring ideational, cognitive, and leadership factors, shows how domestic politics played a crucial role in the three countries’ regional strategies. It detected that Iran’s assessment of threats became more complex, enabling the necessary pragmatism for reinsertion into the international system. The Saudi leadership, satisfied by Washington’s continuity of the Carter Doctrine after the Cold War, perceived Iran’s pragmatism as a signal to readjust ties. The chapter exposes how interconnected environmental perceptions, cognitive lenses, and political ambitions are. These factors explain how the US Dual Containment strategy ensured that attempts to improve the US–Iran ties failed. Thus, the triangle continued to be marked by the US–Iran enmity, ultimately weakening the Saudi–Iranian advances. Eventually, 9/11 and the US’s neoconservativism led to environmental restrictions for both Tehran and Riyadh. In sum, the chapter demonstrates how leadership can drive the relations towards a more collaborative scenario when the systemic environment allows it. However, by 2003, the opportunities faded. Ultimately, the Iraq invasion would return the triangle to a similar scenario of the 1980s: an interventionist Washington, an anxious Riyadh, and a non-conformist Tehran.

Whether captain, kern or knight, martial identities in Elizabethan England and Ireland are as multiple, class-inflected, and contested as the military contexts through which they are experienced and expressed. This chapter argues that John Derricke’s (mis)representations of Gaelic Irish forces and their English others is critical to our understanding of the work’s political and polemical concerns. The woodcuts, in particular, have long been mined for their accurate depiction of weaponry and dress, but the extent to which the work as a whole seeks to obscure how far the Irish kerne and his English counterpart were indistinguishable comrades in arms has gone unremarked.

John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande and Edmund Spenser’s Book Five of The Faerie Queene participate in an ongoing Tudor debate about how best to bring Ireland into a secure British polity. With a simplifying imagery, advocates for military conquest recommended ‘the sword’, and advocates for peaceful civil reform called for ‘the white wand’. This chapter reviews the ceremonial meanings of the white wand in Tudor England – in portraits, law, broadsheets, state papers, literature, and letters – and then shows how writers appropriated those meanings to advance their preferred policy in Ireland. In The Image John Derricke reverses the traditional associations with the white wand as he celebrates Sir Henry Sidney’s policies as the Lord Deputy. In Book Five Edmund Spenser follows this same rhetorical strategy to advocate for conquest of Ireland and only then civil reform.

Around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, American popular music had dominated the entertainment industry. For the first twenty years of the new century, the American music industry had been dominated by Tin Pan Alley. This chapter examines the development of the technologies of sound recording in early cinema and analyses its successful application within a restructured American film industry through an examination of the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Actually, the development of sound cinema ended something of the silent cinema industry's insularity, as Hollywood, the theatrical industry, radio and the music industry came to recognize the mutual economic interests they shared. The Jazz Singer is significant in a number of ways. At one level, it represented the transformation of sound cinema technology into a fully social technology, into something that was to become part of people's everyday experience.

The final chapter moves to the post-war period and considers ‘brown babies’ born in Europe during the years of occupation of Germany and Austria – 1945–55. Some parallels with the British situation but also differences are noted; for example, German children were adopted into the US in their hundreds. Six case studies of 1950s’ British ‘brown babies’ are also presented, their upbringing contextualised in terms of the changing racial landscape of Britain, as West Indians and people from the Indian subcontinent arrived in their thousands. Finally identity, belonging and Britishness are examined, including the way in which, after all these years of living in Britain, the ‘brown babies’ still face the indignity of being asked their country of origin.

In the post-war period various local authorities including police, health and safety inspectors, council officers, and licensing magistrates worked to mediate and regulate the public spaces of youth leisure, particularly those that were open until the early hours of the morning. These spaces, which had a transformative effect on the urban environment after dark, held clear potential to disrupt established ideas about appropriate leisure. Charting the attempts to regulate youth leisure at a national and local level, this chapter considers the meaning that leisure came to hold in the second half of the twentieth century.

Inequalities in cultural production and cultural consumption begin very early in an individual’s life. This chapter analyses survey and interview data to understand how access to culture in childhood might influence getting in and getting on in cultural occupations later in life.The chapter introduces the concept of cultural capital, the cultural resources that help some people feel at home in cultural, and other professional, occupations.The interview data illustrates a theme that runs throughout the rest of the chapters. What seems to be a set of experiences shared by all cultural workers actually hides significant differences. The differences in childhood experience of, and access to, culture reflect social inequalities. In particular social class is crucial in determining who gets access to cultural resources. These include music, drama, poetry, and dance, along with books and libraries. Differing levels of cultural capital, in the context of our unequal education system, mean that the absence of a level playing field for cultural occupations begins very early in life.

The introductory chapter opens with a stark image of what deported ‘Black Britons’ are returned to when they arrive back in Jamaica. It then situates the deportation stories in the book in wider historical context, tracing how the turn to deportation emerged in the UK and other countries of the global North. The chapter then provides a recent history of the figure of the ‘foreign criminal’ in British political discourse, before tracking the journey from Empire Windrush to the deportation of ‘Black Britons’ today. Next, after introducing the theoretical framework and explaining the book’s core focus on the connection between racism and immigration control, the chapter turns to questions of methodology, offering a vivid account of how the research was conducted, and discussing some of the ethical and political questions that emerged in the process.

This chapter explores the thematic connections between two English works rife with pro-Protestant Reformation-era politics and religious polemic, John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581) and John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1560s) (also known as the Book of Martyrs). Both works were published by John Day in London. This chapter highlights Derricke’s apocalyptic rhetoric as well as similarities between his sophisticated visual program of woodcuts, Foxe’s title page, and the religious prints of Albrecht Dürer. Derricke's visual scheme of twelve woodcuts is bifurcated in style between the ‘damned’ Irish and the civilized English who conquered them. Sir Henry Sidney, Derricke's hero against the rebel Irish, is portrayed as more of a Christ-like judge than previously understood.

Cultural occupations have long-standing problems associated with a lack of social mobility. This chapter explains how those problems are experienced by cultural workers. In doing so it shows some of the mechanisms by which exclusions operate.The chapter introduces academic critiques of the idea of social mobility, linking them to the way particular individuals and communities are given value in cultural occupations. The chapter outlines the idea of embodied cultural resources, or capitals, along with the ‘norm’ of the White, middle-class male, in cultural occupations. This somatic norm helps to explain the negative experiences of cultural workers who are not White, middle-class origin men. The chapter highlights the experiences of socially mobile women of colour, a group who are most likely to face marginalisation and discrimination. In doing so the chapter shows the powerful underlying mechanisms preventing change in cultural occupations.