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"Liberal Democrats"
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Liberals
A history of one of the three great British political parties, the party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George, from its foundations in Victorian times to the present.
eBook
Richard Wainwright, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats
Richard Wainwright, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats: Unfinished Business now available in paperback, offers new research on familiar themes involving loyalties of politics, faith and locality. Richard Wainwright was a Liberal MP for seventeen years during the Party’s recovery, but his life tells us about much more than this. Wainwright grew up in prosperity, but learned from voluntary work about poverty; he refused to fight in World War Two, but saw war at its cruellest; he joined the Liberal Party when most had given up on it, but gave his fortune to it; lost a by-election but caused the only Labour loss in Harold Wilson’s landslide of 1966. He then played a key role in the fall of Jeremy Thorpe, the Lib-Lab Pact and the formation of the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the Liberal Democrats; he represented a unique Yorkshire constituency which reflected his pride and hope for society; and though he gave his life to the battle to be in the Commons, he refused a seat in the Lords.Richard Wainwright's story is central to the story of the Liberal Party and sheds light on the reasons for its survival and the state of its prospects. At the same time this book is a parable of politics for anyone who wants to represent an apparently lost cause, who wants to motivate people who have been neglected, and who wants to follow their convictions at the highest level.
eBook
Richard Wainwright, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats
Richard Wainwright, the Liberals and Liberal Democrats: Unfinished Business now available in paperback, offers new research on familiar themes involving loyalties of politics, faith and locality. Richard Wainwright was a Liberal MP for seventeen years during the Party’s recovery, but his life tells us about much more than this. Wainwright grew up in prosperity, but learned from voluntary work about poverty; he refused to fight in World War Two, but saw war at its cruellest; he joined the Liberal Party when most had given up on it, but gave his fortune to it; lost a by-election but caused the only Labour loss in Harold Wilson’s landslide of 1966. He then played a key role in the fall of Jeremy Thorpe, the Lib-Lab Pact and the formation of the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the Liberal Democrats; he represented a unique Yorkshire constituency which reflected his pride and hope for society; and though he gave his life to the battle to be in the Commons, he refused a seat in the Lords. Richard Wainwright's story is central to the story of the Liberal Party and sheds light on the reasons for its survival and the state of its prospects. At the same time this book is a parable of politics for anyone who wants to represent an apparently lost cause, who wants to motivate people who have been neglected, and who wants to follow their convictions at the highest level.
eBook
Gender and the Liberal Democrats
Women and the Liberal Democrats is a timely and original exploration of women's representation and the third party in UK politics. Based on extensive research, it is the first comprehensive gendered analysis of the Liberal Democrats and the research highlights specific institutional factors within the Liberal Democrats that directly impact upon the party's low number of women MPs. It explores the extent to which the party's ideology, culture and organisation are dominated by a prevailing masculine bias and questions why the Liberal Democrats continue to overwhelmingly return white, middle-aged, male MPs to Westminster.The book highlights a number of important findings: the Liberal Democrats' low number of women MPs is due to demand rather than supply; the party have not selected a sufficient number of women in winnable or target seats; the lack of women MPs undermines the party's pro-women policies; and women's interests have not been mainstreamed within the party. Together, these conclusions address substantive questions regarding the Liberal Democrats' numerical under-representation of women MPs and the extent to which they can act for and symbolically represent women.The book demonstrates the importance of using gender as a tool for analysing the culture, organisation and political recruitment of British political parties. Its originality and contribution lie in the empirical findings and its ability to address wider conceptual debates.
eBook
Beyond hegemony
Since the Enlightenment, liberal democrat governments in Europe and North America have been compelled to secure the legitimacy of their authority by constructing rational states whose rationality is based on modern forms of law. The first serious challenge to liberal democratic practices of legal legitimacy comes in Marx’s early writings on Rousseau and Hegel. Marx discovers the limits of formal legal equality that does not address substantive relations of inequality in the workplace and in many other spheres of social life. Beyond Hegemony investigates the authoritarianism and breakdown of those state socialist governments in Russia and elsewhere which claim to put Marx’s ideas on democracy and equality into practice. The book explains that although many aspects of Marx’s critique are still valid today, his ideas need to be supplemented by the contributions to social theory made by Nietzsche, Foucault, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as well as the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole. What emerges is a new theory of political legitimacy which indicates how it is possible to move beyond liberal democracy whilst avoiding the authoritarian turn of state socialism.Schecter points out the weaknesses of the many extra-legal accounts of non-formal legitimacy now on offer, such as those based on friendship and identity. He then argues that the first step beyond hegemony depends on the discovery of forms of legitimate legality and demonstrates why the conditions of legitimate law can be identified.
eBook