Empire, the Economy, and Immigration Britain 1850–2000

Author(s):  
Ceri Peach

To survey the changes in British population between 1850 and 2000 requires some large-scale generalizations. At the beginning of my period, Britain had an empire that held a quarter of the world’s population, but by the end of the period Britain had become part of the European Union and contained one-sixth of the Union’s population. For the first hundred years of the period, Britain was exporting its population to the empire; for the last fifty years, the empire had struck back. The last 150 years have seen huge transformations of the British economy. There has been a shift from agriculture to industry and from industry to services. Coal production rose from 50 million tons in the middle of the nineteenth century to 300 million tons in 1913. By 1999 it had returned to below its 1851 level. Mining scarred the landscape of all the coalfields. Oil production rose from none in 1970 to about 128 million tonnes in 1997, but left hardly a mark on settlement. The steel industry rose and fell. In 1860 there was no crude steel produced (Mitchell 1975: 399). By 1960 25 million tons were produced and now it is down to about half that level. The United Kingdom has undergone the demographic transition. The population rose from 10 million in 1801 to 38 million in 1901 to 59 million now. Six million more people have left the United Kingdom than have entered it since 1851. A tide, from the beginning of the twentieth century, has swept the rural population into the biggest cities until the post-1950 backwash has scattered it out to suburbia, exurbia, and market towns. Urbanization has been followed by suburbanization; suburbanization by counter-urbanization. The Fordist system of mass production produced the Fordist city of mass-produced housing design, the Victorian, terraced inner city. The post-Fordist era hollowed out the inner cities and produced the green belts, the new towns, and the scatter of light industry. The new international division of labour squeezed the manufacturing employment of the country out to the third world.

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-261
Author(s):  
Chris Heffer

This chapter summarizes the main analytical moves in the TRUST heuristic for analyzing untruthfulness. It then applies the heuristic to three short texts that have been widely called out as lies: Trump’s tweet about large-scale voter fraud just before the 2016 presidential elections; the “Brexit Battle Bus” claim that the United Kingdom sent £350 million per week to the European Union; and Tony Blair’s 2002 statement to Parliament about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. The cases share a common theme: the capacity of untruthful public discourse to undermine democratic legitimacy by, respectively, questioning the integrity of electoral procedures, harming the capacity of voters to make a rational choice, and undermining faith in the rational and responsible deliberation of one’s leaders. The chapter troubles the simple attribution of lying in these cases and shows how a TRUST analysis can lead to a deeper understanding of the types and ethical value of untruthfulness.


1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (8) ◽  
pp. 1131-1160 ◽  
Author(s):  
P M Ward

It is often assumed that the globalization of the world economy will drive societies and societal change in a broadly similar direction, leading to convergence in the process of urbanization. The observed diversity between places is the result of the engagement of the macroeconomic process with local social and political structures. Inner-city decline in many older metropolitan centers of the USA and the United Kingdom has occurred through economic restructuring and job loss, with smaller urban centers and amenity-rich areas benefiting concomitantly. Demographic processes have accentuated this decline: most notably suburbanization, counterurbanization, inner-city renewal programs, and urban resettlement to new towns. Since the early 1980s, however, selected inner cities have been the focus of reinvestment, and a return of population through so-called ‘gentrification’. In the United Kingdom, in particular, public policy has played an important role in the reinvigoration of inner cities. The substantial literature on UK and US cities is reviewed insofar as it might shed light on convergent processes in Latin American inner cities. In fact, the evidence suggests little convergence. The demography is different, with relatively low levels of visible population decline; and the economy of the inner city remains vibrant, focusing upon services and small-scale artisan activities, with no corresponding decline in heavy industry. Although large-scale redevelopment projects in and around the downtown were common during the 1940s to the 1960s, the demise of authoritarian and dirigiste-type leaders, 1980s austerity, and a growing democratic base, have imposed severe limitations on the extent of large-scale urban redevelopment and reinvestment. Cultural and aesthetic influences also militate against a demand from the middle-income and upper-income groups to gentrify the inner city; nor is the ‘rent-gap’ sufficient to stimulate private-sector supply of new or refurbished homes a likely option in the city center. Policy prescriptions in Latin America should take account of this divergence and fundamental differences in kind, and should aim to develop existing opportunities and land uses for an incumbent working-class population, rather than seeking to attract new uses and better-off populations into the core.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-151
Author(s):  
Andrea Circolo ◽  
Ondrej Hamuľák

Abstract The paper focuses on the very topical issue of conclusion of the membership of the State, namely the United Kingdom, in European integration structures. The ques­tion of termination of membership in European Communities and European Union has not been tackled for a long time in the sources of European law. With the adop­tion of the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), the institute of 'unilateral' withdrawal was intro­duced. It´s worth to say that exit clause was intended as symbolic in its nature, in fact underlining the status of Member States as sovereign entities. That is why this institute is very general and the legal regulation of the exercise of withdrawal contains many gaps. One of them is a question of absolute or relative nature of exiting from integration structures. Today’s “exit clause” (Art. 50 of Treaty on European Union) regulates only the termination of membership in the European Union and is silent on the impact of such a step on membership in the European Atomic Energy Community. The presented paper offers an analysis of different variations of the interpretation and solution of the problem. It´s based on the independent solution thesis and therefore rejects an automa­tism approach. The paper and topic is important and original especially because in the multitude of scholarly writings devoted to Brexit questions, vast majority of them deals with institutional questions, the interpretation of Art. 50 of Treaty on European Union; the constitutional matters at national UK level; future relation between EU and UK and political bargaining behind such as all that. The question of impact on withdrawal on Euratom membership is somehow underrepresented. Present paper attempts to fill this gap and accelerate the scholarly debate on this matter globally, because all consequences of Brexit already have and will definitely give rise to more world-wide effects.


Author(s):  
Paul Craig

This chapter analyzes engagement and disengagement with international institutions from the perspective of U.K. law. The first part of the chapter considers the relevant legal rules that pertain to engagement by the United Kingdom in international institutions. It is divided into three sections. The first section is directed toward dualism as understood in U.K. constitutional law, whereby an international treaty cannot take effect in national law unless it has been transformed or adopted into domestic law, thereby preventing the executive from undertaking obligations without the imprimatur of the U.K. legislature. The second section explains the U.K. constitutional rules designed to prevent the executive from ratifying an international treaty, and hence committing the United Kingdom at the international level, before Parliament has had the opportunity to consider the treaty. This area is interesting, since it reveals a shift from practice, to a convention, and then to a statutory obligation. The third part investigates the limits of dualism, connoting in this respect that the doctrinal rules explicated here apply to formal treaties, but do not cover all global regulatory rules, which can impact, de jure or de facto, on the United Kingdom. The focus in the second section of the chapter shifts to the constitutional constraints that limit the national applicability of a treaty regime that the United Kingdom has ratified. Parliament may impose constraints on delegation, which condition the legal reception in U.K. law of changes made by an international organization. There are, in addition, constitutional constraints fashioned by the courts, which can affect the acceptance of rules or decisions made by an international organization, to which the United Kingdom is a party, within the U.K. legal order, more especially where U.K. courts feel that such a rule of decision can impact adversely on U.K. constitutional identity. These judicially created constraints can be interpretive or substantive. The final part of the chapter is concerned with disengagement from international institutions. The relevant legal precepts are, to a certain degree, symmetrical with those that govern initial engagement. The basic starting point is that the executive, acting pursuant to prerogative power, negotiates withdrawal or disengagement from an international organization, and Parliament then enacts or repeals the requisite legislation to make this a legal reality in national law. Matters can, however, be more complex, as exemplified by the litigation concerning the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.


Author(s):  
Alma-Pierre Bonnet

The decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union came as a shock to many. A key player during the referendum campaign was the Vote Leave organisation which managed to convince people that they would be better off outside the European project. Their success was made all the easier as Euroscepticism had been running deep in the country for decades. It is on this fertile ground that Vote Leavers drew to persuade people of the necessity to leave. Using critical metaphor analysis, this paper examines the way Vote Leavers won the argument by developing three political myths, which, once combined, conjured up the notion of British grandeur. Drawing on Jonathan Charteris-Black’s seminal works on the relation between metaphors and the creation of political myths in political rhetoric, this paper posits that the Brexit debate was not won solely on political ground and that the manipulative power of metaphors may have also been a key element. This might explain the current political deadlock, as political solutions might not provide the answers to the questions raised during the campaign.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
João Gualberto Marques Porto Júnior

A relação entre o Reino Unido e os países do continente foi marcada ao longo da história por diversos desencontros e disputas. Não foram poucas as guerras travadas entre os britânicos e outras nações europeias. A própria integração europeia inicia-se sem o Reino Unido que apenas na década de 1960 decidiu integrar as comunidades, sendo durante anos impedido pela Franca de Charles de Gaulle. A adesão tardia em 1973 não minimizou as diferenças, tendo novamente havido tensões na década seguinte durante a gestão Margaret Thatcher. As diferenças do casal estranho continuaram após a criação da União Europeia em 1992 e tiveram na decisão do Brexit apenas o desfecho de uma relação distante e tumultuada.ABSTRACTThe relation between the United Kingdom and the countries from "the continent” has been characterized by several disputes and differences along history. A large number of wars were fought between the British and other European nations. Even the European integration started without the United Kingdom, that only decided to take part in the communities in the sixties, being, however, blocked by de Gaulle’s France. Britain’s late accession to the European Communities in 1973 did not reduce the differences with its European neighbors and several tensions emerged during Margaret Thatcher’s government during the eighties. The differences between the odd couple continued after the creation of the European Union in 1992 and the “Brexit” simply represents the natural outcome of a distant and tumultuous relationship.Palavras-chave: Integração europeia, Reino Unido, BrexitKeywords: European integration, United Kingdom, BrexitDOI: 10.12957/rmi.2015.24641Recebido em 08 de Julho de 2016 / Received on July 8, 2016.


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