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Fifty years ago Enoch Powell made national headlines with his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, warning of an immigrant invasion in the once respectable streets of Wolverhampton. This local fixation brought the Black Country town into the national spotlight, yet Powell's unstable relationship with Wolverhampton has since been overlooked. Drawing from interviews and archival material, this book offers a rich local history through which to investigate the speech, bringing to life the racialised dynamics of space during a critical moment in British history. What was going on beneath the surface in Wolverhampton and how did Powell's constituents respond to this dramatic moment? The research traces the ways in which Powell's words reinvented the town and uncovers highly contested local responses. While Powell left Wolverhampton in 1974, the book returns to the city to explore the collective memories of the speech which continue to reverberate. In a contemporary period of new crisis and national divisions, revisiting the shadow of Powell allows us to reflect on racism and resistance from 1968 to today.

This book is a history of the British Musicians’ Union (MU) from its origins in 1893 to 2013. It uses the Union as a prism through which to examine changes in musicians’ working lives, the industries they work in and wider British society. It argues that musicians can best be considered as particular sorts of worker and that while the MU’s history has hitherto largely been ignored or marginalised, it has much to teach us about musicians, their working lives and the power dynamics of the music industries.

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past.The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.

As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.

This handbook provides comprehensive and expert analysis of the impact of the Brexit process and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union on existing and future EU-UK relations within the context of both EU and international law. Examining the wider international law implications, it additionally assesses the complex legal consequences of Brexit for both the EU and the UK in their dealings with third states and other international organizations. With contributions from renowned specialists in the field of EU external action, each chapter will analyse specific policy areas to address key challenges arising from the Brexit process for the EU and the UK and propose solutions to overcome these problems. The handbook aims to fill a gap in research by assessing the consequences of Brexit under EU external relations law and international law. As such, it is hoped it will set the research agenda for coming years on the international dimension of Brexit. The Routledge Handbook on the International Dimension of Brexit is an authoritative and essential reference text for scholars and students of international and European/EU law and policy, EU politics, and British politics and Brexit, as well as of key relevance to legal practitioners involved in Brexit, governments, policy-makers, civil society organizations, think tanks, practitioners, national parliaments and the Court of Justice.

Of the many state-enacted cruelties to which refugees and asylum seekers are subjected, detention and deportation loom largest in popular consciousness. But there is a third practice, perpetrating a slower violence, that remains hidden: dispersal.Jonathan Darling provides the first detailed account of how dispersal - the system of accommodation and support for asylum seekers and refugees in Britain - both sustains and produces patterns of violence, suffering and social abjection. He explores the evolution of dispersal as a privatised process, from the first outsourced asylum accommodation contracts in 2012 to the renewed wave of outsourcing pursued by the Home Office today.Drawing on six years of research into Britain's dispersal system, and foregrounding the voices and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers, Darling argues that dispersal has played a central role in the erasure of asylum from public concern. Systems of Suffering is a vital tool in the arsenal of those fighting to hold the government to account for the violence of its asylum policy and practice.

Bob Crow was the most well-known and most militant union leader of his generation. This biography examines his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his personal characteristics (including his public persona), his politics and the power of his members, it explains how and why he was able to punch above his weight in industrial relations and on the political stage, helping the small RMT union become as influential as many of its much larger counterparts. As RMT leader, he oversaw a rise in membership, a more assertive and successful bargaining approach, and led the realignment of radical left politics in response to the hegemony of 'new' Labour. While he failed to unite all socialists into one new party, he established himself as the leading popular critic of neo-liberalism, 'new' Labour and the age of austerity.

This is a book for those who love British cinema and want to know more about its rise to popularity in the 1940s. The 'quality' films of the decade have been thoroughly explored already, but this book looks at the films the public actually went to see, and provides detailed information on the directors behind them.

Government management of fisheries has been little short of disastrous. In many regions, valuable fish stocks have collapsed as a result of overfishing. Ill-conceived regulation also means that every year millions of tons of edible fish are thrown back dead into the sea. While an absence of established property rights means that wild fish are vulnerable to overfishing, the problem is greatly exacerbated by large subsidies. State intervention has created significant overcapacity in the industry and undermined the economic feedback mechanisms that help to protect stocks. This short book sets out a range of policy options to improve outcomes. As well as ending counterproductive subsidies, these include community-based management of coastal zones and the introduction of individual transferable quotas. The analysis is particularly relevant to the UK as it begins the process of withdrawal from the European Union. After decades of mismanagement under the Common Fisheries Policy, Brexit represents a major opportunity to adopt an economically rational approach that benefits the fishing industry, taxpayers and consumers.