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.

This chapter looks briefly at some of the earliest developments in the relationship between recorded music and the screen, suggesting reasons as to why available technologies failed to develop into fully social technologies. An overview of some of the major subsequent developments offers a rationale for the importance of studying popular music and moving image culture. Early cinema developed within a complex commercial, technological and ideological context, a context which also witnessed the development, at around the same time, of recorded music. Recorded music widened the availability of a range of music and singers to a mass audience, consumed in the privacy of their own homes. In spite of clear evidence that the relationship between popular music and the screen media is a long-standing dynamic one, the emergence of music video in the early and mid-1980s leads many to argue that it represented a distinct cultural form, epitomizing postmodern culture.

Chapter 3 describes Ricardo’s life growing up in the West Midlands. Ricardo was subject to intense police harassment, and the chapter argues firstly that racist policing makes some non-citizens more vulnerable to deportation power than others. Importantly, however, deportation not only reflects racism in wider society, it is also part of shifting how racism gets articulated thereafter. In other words, immigration controls produce as well as reflect racism. Painfully, Ricardo’s older brother was also deported a few years before him and killed in Montego Bay two years after his return. Ricardo is doing well in Jamaica, all things considered – he has work, housing and is starting a new family – while his brother, Delon, did not get the chance.

The House of Lords makes a substantial contribution to the work of the British parliament. If the most time consuming bills are all introduced first into the Commons, this can result in the flow of legislative work for the Lords being very uneven, sometimes giving peers a great deal to do towards the end of the session. By common consent the work of the House of Lords in revising government bills is its most important task. A second strand to Lords committee work was the establishment in 1974 of the European Communities Committee to scrutinise draft Community legislation and other relevant matters. This rapidly became a major aspect of the work of the House. This chapter has argued that in relation to the functions of scrutiny and holding the executive to account the Lords does add value to the work of the Commons.

This chapter examines the nature and consequences of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011, providing for fixed parliamentary terms of five years, but with provision for an early election under specified conditions. It looks at the provisions for the calling of general elections prior to passage of the Act, the arguments and political imperative underpinning the introduction of the measure, the nature and passage of the bill and the consequences deriving from its provisions. It focuses on section 2 of the act iing the means for holding an early general election and considers the problems associated with interpreting what happens in the event of a motion of no confidence being carried.

explores the key twists and turns in the history of the corporation and foregrounds core ideas that have shaped its development. The chapter begins by outlining how the corporate person is established as a kind of superhuman subject that exists as an entity distinct from the members who invest in it. The peculiar concept of “corporate personhood” was shaped throughout history with one primary purpose in mind: to provide commercial incentives to those investors. Chapter 1 shows how the corporate person was freed to do this as it gained status as a contracting party and a legal subject in commercial law. The corporation is described in this chapter as a “structure of irresponsibility”; it is an institution that is designed to dehumanise social relationships, and guarantee indifference to human suffering and environmental degradation. It is by uniing the theory and practice that shaped the evolution of the corporation that we begin to understand why the form that the contemporary corporation takes is probably as close as we could get to a model organisation that is capable of destroying the world.

This chapter defines and discusses the role of constitutional conventions, viewing them as the oil in the formal machinery of the constitution. It distinguishes them from law and practice. It examines how conventions come into being and details key conventions of the constitution, such as the monarch giving assent to any bill passed by the two Houses of Parliament and the prime minister having to be an MP. It identifies practices that have been confused with conventions (such as the Sewel ‘convention’), conventions than have been transposed into statutes (such as elections resulting from votes of no confidence), and conventions that have been broken or appeared close to being broken, not least under the premiership of Boris Johnson.

This chapter examines the principle of ministerial responsibility, encompassing collective and individual responsibility. It draws out the mix of conventions and practices that comprise the doctrine, identifies the consequences for government, not least line management for government departments (individual responsibility) and a united front by government (collective responsibility), the means by which the doctrine is enforced, the extent to which individual responsibility has been misunderstood in terms of ministerial culpability, and the extent to which collective responsibility has been challenged in recent years by ministerial leaks and failure to vote loyally with the whips.