Category: Britain-EEC/EU relations
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The last time the government evoked the ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ slogan
The new Home Secretary Amber Rudd has, in the wake of Brexit, evoked the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’, which has been used in the past by Gordon Brown in 2007 and by the British National Party and the National Front in the 1980s. While she has been heavily criticized for her statements, this…
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New piece at History & Policy: Brexit, imperial nostalgia and the “white man’s world”
This is just a quick note to let people know that the website History & Policy has published a piece by myself and Steven Gray (University of Portsmouth) on Brexit and imperial nostalgia for the ‘white man’s world’ of the former settler colonies. You can read the piece here.
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Policing the Northern Irish border in the 1970s
With the debate about ‘Brexit’ heating up in the final week before the Referendum, there has been more and more debate about what would happen to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the British, Northern Irish and Irish authorities were also concerned about this border,…
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‘Fortress Britain’ and the end of the Cold War
Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian this week that the walls and barriers that had fallen in 1989 were being rebuilt in 2015. A cartoon in the pages of Marxism Today published in December 1989 seems to have made the same argument – that while the West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall,…
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New journal article – ‘The Myth of Sovereignty: British Immigration Control in Policy and Practice in the Nineteen-Seventies’
This is just a quick post to announce that our long-awaited article in Historical Research journal has now been published online through early view and can found here. The title of the article is ‘The Myth of Sovereignty: British Immigration Control in Policy and Practice in the Nineteen-Seventies’, with the following abstract: This article explores how…
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The ‘Smethwick Problem’ in 2010: Labour, Immigration and Responding to Electoral Defeat
This is a draft paper that I wrote in early 2012 for a proposed collection on social democracy and labour politics in Australia and Britain in the 21st century. However this proposed collection seems not to have taken off and I thought I’d post it here, partially in response to Ed Miliband’s comments last week…
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The legacy of Enoch Powell
The following is just a little rejoinder to something that David Osler wrote in his post about UKIP and the legacy of Powellism. While I agree with most of what Osler wrote, he did argue: In more recent years, any hint of sympathy for the proposition that ‘Enoch was right’ has been a hanging offence…
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UKIP, the BNP/EDL and the political space of the far right
I wasn’t going to write anything on the electoral victories of UKIP, but discussion on other blogs (such as this on the Socialist Unity blog and this from Hope not Hate) got me thinking about how the left, the labour movement and the anti-fascist movement were going to react to this. Was it going to be similar to…
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Forty years ago today (or yesterday), the UK border control system entered its modern phase
I do hope to write a post about the newly released 1984-85 Cabinet documents of the Hawke Government released by the National Archives yesterday, but I realised that January 1, 2013 is the fortieth anniversary of the reforms of the UK border control system that have created the system that is in place today –…
New Historical Express 