scholarly journals Deindustrialization, the Linwood Car Plant and Scotland’s Political Divergence from England in the 1960s and 1970s

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Phillips ◽  
Valerie Wright ◽  
Jim Tomlinson

Abstract Scotland’s political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote share of Conservative and Unionist candidates was lower in Scotland than in England. From the late 1960s onwards there were also ambitions for constitutional change. This article breaks new conceptual and empirical ground by relating these important markers of political divergence to popular understanding among Scottish workers of deindustrialization. A Thompsonian moral economy framework is deployed. Expectations were elevated by industrial restructuring from the 1950s, with workers exchanging jobs in the staples for a better future in assembly goods. Labour governments earned a reputation in Scotland as better managers of this process than Conservative governments. The 1979 general election showed that Labourism was growing in popularity in Scotland just as its appeal faded in England. At Linwood moral economy expectations were compromised, chiefly by intermittent redundancy and recurrent threat of closure, which was averted in 1975 by Labour government intervention. When the plant was shut in 1981 criticisms of UK political-constitutional structures and Conservativism were intensified.

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri

When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height’s careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri’s work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Loss

AbstractIn the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-105
Author(s):  
Emily Na

This article traces how the queer Black writer James Baldwin’s transnational palate and experiences influenced the ways he wrote about Black domestic spaces in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, while Black feminist cooks and writers like Edna Lewis, Jessica B. Harris, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor developed new theories of soul food in relation to the Black American community and broader American cuisine, Baldwin incorporated these philosophies and transnational tastes into his lifestyle and works. He traveled and worked around Europe, settling in places like Paris, Istanbul, and Saint-Paul de Vence for years at a time. In Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent his last years, he set up his own welcome table, at which he hosted internationally renowned guests and shared his love of cuisine. Inevitably, Baldwin’s passion for cooking and hosting meals became a large, though scholarly neglected, component of his novels and essays. In his novels Another Country, which he finished in Istanbul and published in 1962, and Just Above My Head, which he finished in Saint-Paul de Vence and published in 1979, Baldwin’s depictions of food and Black kitchens take a queer turn. Instead of lingering on traditional Black family structures, these texts specifically present new formulations of intimate home life and reimagine relationships between food, kitchens, race, and sex in the late twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Jad Smith

Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934–1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. This book, an intensive review of Brunner's life and works, demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, the book approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including his uneasy association with the “New Wave” of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and between hard and soft science fiction, and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.


boundary 2 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Lea Spira

This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to flourish in their stead. The arc of Sosa’s work spans the transitions of the epoch and their attendant affective economies: from the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s–1970s, to the deep sorrows of the early military regimes, to the infinite deferrals of justice that animated the neoliberal project. In closing, I examine solidarity responses to the 2014 attack on Gaza. Embodying the rejuvenation of joint decolonial struggle, they rupture the Zionist stronghold that has shaped dominant structures of feeling, overwhelmingly laying purchase on the popular imagination.


Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (73) ◽  
pp. 12-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Keene

This paper draws on the work of E. P. Thompson to understand anticapitalist resistance in northern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Through an analysis of the back-to-the-land movement in a region I call “Claytown,” I show how the making of a rural moral economy was in part enabled by the presence of a nascent marijuana industry. However, whereas a relatively small-scale marijuana industry helped forge anticapitalist resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, this industry has become a form through which values of capitalist political economy are being instantiated and reasserted. I situate my ethnographic analysis within a broader historical and legal framework to show how a contemporary moral economy is made and increasingly unmade in the context of late capitalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht

Neoliberalism was a global spectrum of ideas on how to create and preserve free markets in an age of popular sovereignty. A notion of a powerful state to create the institutions and mentalities needed for a liberal market society, and—if need be—to fend off potentially antiliberal democratic majorities characterized neoliberal ideas far more than antistate laissez-faire economics or apolitical technocratic visions. The article presents historical evidence from Chile and Russia from the 1960s to the 1990s to make the case that global varieties of neoliberal ideas were created in different local contexts. These ideas were not imposed or imported from without; they emerged from domestic intellectual trajectories and in engagement with local political and economic conditions before their carriers connected to other, both Western and “peripheral,” varieties of neoliberalism. Actual economic reforms undertaken in these countries were not a wholesale implementation of a neoliberal agenda or manifestations of a globally hegemonic “governmentality”; rather, they were the outcome of multiple ideational influences and, more crucially, the result of domestic political power play.


Author(s):  
Lou Martin

This concluding chapter examines how the rural-industrial working-class culture that emerged in Hancock County gradually disappeared in the late twentieth century. The ethic of making do traveled well from the farm to the factory town, but it began its decline in the late 1960s and 1970s as buying power increased and industrial workers focused more on vacations or socializing and less on making do. While many people in Hancock County still tend gardens, work on their houses, hunt, and fish, these activities no longer supplement family income the way they did in the 1950s. Moreover, the localism of their culture may have persisted in some ways to the present, but a localized system of negotiation that local manufacturers helped create disappeared along with many of those companies.


Author(s):  
Karissa Haugeberg

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of the American antiabortion movement. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, women prolife activists founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on clinic records, oral histories, organizational records, and interviews with prominent figures, Women against Abortion examines American women's fight against abortion. It also elucidates the complicated relationship between gender politics, religion, and politics as notions of equality, secularism, and partisanship were recast in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, it looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward, it traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. The book also looks at the activism of Shelley Shannon, a prominent evangelical Protestant pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Women against Abortion explores important questions, including the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.


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