Category: Elections
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‘Who Governs Britain?’: The last time the Tories called a snap election…
In between the ‘hey-day’ of 1968-69 and the upsurge in trade union militancy and political radicalism of 1971-74, the 1970s began for the British left as a period of a political plateau, only shaken up by the unexpected election of the Conservatives under Edward Heath. Although Harold Wilson had faced several political problems in the…
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1951 and the attempt to ban the Australian Communist Party: When Turnbull’s predecessor gambled on a double dissolution election
Yesterday Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that if the Senate did not pass two pieces of legislation to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), he would call for the Governor-General to issue the writs for a double dissolution election. This would mean that all seats in both the House of Representatives and…
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The road to ‘The Dismissal’ in 1975: The British perspective
The Museum of Australian Democracy has announced that in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, it will be tweeting the events of late 1975 leading up to 11 November. This will be a very interesting for those into in Australian history and helpful in understanding how the events in…
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New article on Australian Border Force for Salvage mag
This is just a quick post to let people know that the new left-wing magazine from the UK, Salvage (established by ex-SWPers China Miéville and Richard Seymour, amongst others) has just published an online article by me on the failure of Operation Fortitude and the Australian Border Force controversy. You can find the article here.…
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2011 was not 1981. And 2015 is not 1983.
Back in 2011, I wrote about how many people viewed the riots that swept across the UK through the lens of the 1981 riots. I wrote in this article: Karl Marx famously paraphrased Hegel in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, saying that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history, as it…
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Local legal history: A microcosm of the South Australian government’s ‘law & order’ agenda under Rann
While I was a criminal justice researcher in the public sector, I got really interested in sentencing laws in Australia and their history. This might form part of a broader paper about the pursuit of a ‘law and order’ agenda in South Australia under the 2002-2011 Rann government. As Don Weatherburn wrote in his book…
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40 years since the beginning of the ‘three day week’
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the ‘three day week’, which lasted from 1 January to 6 March 1974. The ‘three day week’ was an initiative by the Heath Government to avoid the stand-still of Britain’s industry in response to the Oil Crisis of late 1973 and the threat of a…
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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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Liberals question relevancy of academic research
I just thought I’d mention this. A day after I wrote this post about questions of relevancy for academic research, the Liberals have announced that they would cut ARC funding for ‘wasteful’ projects. They identified several current ARC projects that they indicate would not attract similar funding if sought under an Abbott government. Both the…
New Historical Express 