THE LABOUR PARTY AND THE PARLIAMENTARY CAMPAIGN TO ABOLISH THE MILITARY DEATH PENALTY, 1919–1930

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN McHUGH
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The Military

This is a study of a successful parliamentary campaign led throughout the 1920s by a small group of backbench Labour MPs aimed at abolishing the military death penalty for the offences of cowardice and desertion. It was sustained in the face of opposition from the military establishment, the Conservatives, and finally the House of Lords. The campaigners used the opportunity afforded by the requirement on government to pass, annually, an Army Bill, to challenge the military establishment's insistence that a capital penalty was essential to the maintenance of army discipline. Despite the unwillingness of the 1924 Labour government to confront the military on this issue, the reformers persevered, securing some minor, incremental reform before the coming of the second Labour government in 1929. The new government was prevailed upon by backbench pressure to authorize a free vote in the Commons which approved the abolition of the capital penalty for cowardice and desertion in the Army Act of 1930.

15. Case Study: Constitutionally Contested Legislation

Public Law ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 443-482
Author(s):  
Andrew Le Sueur ◽  
Maurice Sunkin ◽  
Jo Eric Khushal Murkens
Keyword(s):  
Wild Animals ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Constitutional Conventions ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks at the circumstances surrounding two events. The first is the 2005 decision of the UK Parliament to set up a committee to examine whether the constitutional conventions governing the relationship between the House of Lords and the House of Commons should be codified. The second is the decision of the Commons (and the Labour government) to press ahead and present the Hunting Bill 2004 for royal assent despite the opposition of the Lords to the policy of a total ban on hunting wild animals with dogs; the Lords preferred a policy of licensed hunting.

The Sword of Gold: Sidney Godolphin and War Finance, 1702–1710

1974 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Calvin Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
Louis Xiv ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Bank Of England ◽  
War Finance ◽  
The Face ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Military ◽  
Land Bank ◽  
Holding Responsible

Queen Anne's appointment of Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, as Lord Treasurer in 1702 was a fortunate choice for England. The country faced a war with France occasioned by the empty Spanish throne and the expansionist schemes of Louis XIV. England needed a man of ability in finance, experience in government, and credit with queen and country to handle home affairs and finance the armies of the allies on the continent. The Duke of Marlborough, head of England's armies, considered his friend Godolphin the only man for the task. He even threatened not to command English armies unless Godolphin took the Treasury post. Godolphin had opposed the war with France and had resigned from a Treasury post in 1701 for this reason, but in 1702 he accepted the white staff of Lord Treasurer at the insistence of his friend Marlborough.During the course of the War Of Spanish Succession Lord Godolphin used his exceptional talents to finance the military forces of England—land and sea—and to provide large amounts of money for the military expenses of England's allies in the conflict. He was successful while Louis XIV's efforts to accomplish the same ends by some of the same means failed.Godolphin possessed expertise and long experience in national finance, holding responsible Treasury positions in the reigns of Charles II, James II, and William III, before becoming Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer. Recognizing the advantages that the Bank of England could provide for national finance, he had helped push the proposal for its establishment through the House of Lords in the face of strong opposition in 1694. He had also favored a Land Bank that eventually came to naught. Seeing the value of exchequer bills in expanding the nation's money system during William III's reign, he made extensive use of this novel idea in financing Queen Anne's war.

The Lords' Debate On Hanging July 1956: Interpretation and Comment

Philosophy ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 32 (121) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
W. B. Gallie
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
Moral Conflicts ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
The Commons

The House of Lords debate of July last on the Death Penalty Abolition Bill1 may prove to have been a landmark in British constitutional and legal history; certainly it was of the greatest interest as a specimen of current moral thinking and moral conflicts on the death penalty; and it is in this latter light that I shall discuss it here. Socialists and radicals might of course complain that a predominantly Conservative House of Lords could not be representative of current thinking; and they might contrast the voting for the second reading of Mr. Silverman's Bill in the Lords—Contents 95, Non-contents 238—with the votes that had previously been recorded in the Commons.

On War and Peace

1954 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-494
Author(s):  
Robert Strausz-Hupe
Keyword(s):  
Physical Environment ◽  
The State ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
Technical Device ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Survival ◽  
The Military

Millions of men stand under arms to defend democracy Their weapons are fashioned by scientific technology which, now as always before, has placed its highest ingenuity at the service of its most important client: the military establishment. The state, the schools and the mass media do not shirk the task of indoctrination: they have employed every available technical device in order to spread awareness of the dangers which threaten democracy as well as national survival. Yet the flame of the martial spirit flickers but feebly in the heart of Western man, more feebly indeed than in any epoch of the West's dangerous history. Citizens respond dutifully to the call to arms. They cannot do otherwise in the face of the comprehensive controls and sanctions available to the state. Individual men among them are still capable of high feats of heroism at war, as high as those performed by warriors in ages past. Yet no one can deny that the democracies are loath to fight and that abiding popular aversion to war has forced democratic statesmen into a long series of diplomatic retreats. Science that has done so much to defend the democracies against aggression has also taught them that there is no defense against aggression and that its latest tools might prove as deleterious to the victor as to the defeated. More important still, science has taught men to value life as their highest possession and to abhor death, to abhor death not so much as the ineluctable fate of all living things but as the break in a process of expanding knowledge and possession of the physical environment. There is little in the history of our times to show that modern man is more averse to violence than were his forebears. There is some evidence showing that he views and handles violence with an impersonal detachment that would have shocked his ancestors inured to the precariousness and brutality of a prescientific civilization. Modern man, like all men before him, eschews violence that begets retribution, seeks to avoid pain and cherishes the good things upon earth. What sets him apart from preceding generations is his belief in his perfectibility upon earth and the dreadful and absurd finality of death.

The role of personal value preferences in predicting army stress

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S360-S360
Author(s):  
E. Tartakovsky ◽  
N. Rofe
Keyword(s):  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Stressful Environment ◽  
Personal Value ◽  
Security Values ◽  
The Face ◽  
Competing Interest ◽  
Army Service ◽  
The Military ◽  
Value Preferences

BackgroundThe military is a stressful environment, and many service persons experience army stress. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors affecting army stress and stress resiliency.ObjectiveThe present study examines the connections between personal value preferences and army stress, applying the value congruency paradigm.MethodMale soldiers serving in three combat units in the Israeli Defense Forces participated in the study (n = 257).ResultsThe results obtained demonstrated that personal value preferences explained a significant proportion of the variance in army stress beyond the socio-demographic variables. A lower stress level was associated with a higher preference for the values of societal security, conformity, achievement, and universalism, and with a lower preference for the face and personal security values.ConclusionsThe research promotes our understanding of the relationships between general motivational goals expressed in personal value preferences and stress in the military context. In addition, the results obtained indicate the possible relevance of using values for selecting and preparing recruits who will most likely adjust well to the army framework. Finally, some value-oriented interventions that may be used for promoting the soldiers’ psychological adjustment during their army service are suggested.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

scholarly journals The Independent Labour Party and Planning, 1920–26

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Bank Of England ◽  
Policy Statements

The failure of the ILP to convince a Labour opposition, and then a Labour government after 1929, to abandon its view that banking and politics were quite separate fields of activity is well-known. Politicians were not bankers: it was as simple as that. Ramsay MacDonald, though not averse to political programmes as such, was certainly suspicious of “unauthorised” programmes. In a veiled but unmistakable reference to ILP policy statements, he told the 1927 Labour Party conference that“authorised programmes might have a certain number of inconveniences, but unauthorised programmes had many more inconveniences, and he was not at all sure that during the last twelve months or two years the Labour Party had not suffered more from unauthorised programmes and statements than it had suffered from the issue of well-considered and well-thought-out documents and pronouncements.”Philip Snowden was much more explicit. Unlike Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, Snowden did recognise a causal relationship between changes in the availability of credit and changes in the levels of production and employment, but thought that this was a relationship which politicians should not interfere with. Control of credit held within it the possibility of inflation. “It might be highly dangerous”, Snowden warned the 1928 Labour Party conference, “in the hands of a Government that wanted to use this means in order to serve some purpose, or to gain popular support.” One might achieve temporary benefits, such as the reduction of unemployment from one and a quarter million to a quarter of a million in nine months, but there would be a terrible price to pay later – all the more terrible because unspecified.

The Evolution of Morality

PARADIGMI ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 173-196
Author(s):  
Stephan White
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Evolution Of Morality ◽  
Morality Plays ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Commons ◽  
One Step

It seems clear that cooperation when cheating would go undetected - for example, in many-person prisoner's dilemmas or "tragedy of the commons" cases - is a precondition of the functioning of modern social institutions. Such cooperation seems difficult to explain in evolutionary terms, however, since those who are disposed to cheat seem to enjoy a systematic advantage relative to those who are not. Further- more, the appeal to mechanisms for the detection and punishment of noncooperation, since those mechanisms themselves presuppose cooperation, merely pushes the problem one step back. In this paper I argue that morality plays an ineliminable role in the explanation of the forms of cooperation in question. Moreover, I provide a schema for the evolution of morality in the face of the advantages that those disposed to cheat apparently enjoy.

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